How to Be a Giant, Part One

It has taken me quite awhile to coherently articulate my reaction to Barack Obama being elected the 44th President of the United States. I am 100% cynical when it comes to our political process and those who rise to the top of that process. I would have enthusiastically voted for Ron Paul but couldn't bring myself to vote for either of the two representatives of the established political parties. I am sick of "politics as usual" and heard nothing new in either McCain's or Obama's platforms. However, I was fascinated by the play of story on election day and made sure my homeschooled lovelies watched the election coverage with me. This was part of the fabric of their childhood story after all.

And then, something happened. And for days afterward, the only clear sentence in the swirl of my reaction to the election was, "Something just happened."

As she so often does, my friend Kara over at MotherHenna began laying straight the fibers of my reaction. Kara walked me through her own story - and in doing so, I began to see that I, and we as a nation, had just walked through a gateway of Before and After.

In our Declaration of Independence, within the most often quoted passage in fact, lay our first institutional lie: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Indeed, further on in the same document, we get a hint that the Founding Fathers did not really mean ALL men as Jefferson cites the King's crimes including: "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions." The dividing up of "Us" and "Them" was truly begun.

I was born in 1966. I have not seen the timespan of changes illustrated by President Elect Obama in his acceptance speech. I was born after the Fifteenth Amendment gave men of any color the right to vote. I was born after the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote. It wasn't until our nation walked through the Before/After gate of electing the very first non-white man as our President that the crashing effect of those institutional lies hit me. It wasn't enough that individual lives, personal stories across time and space had overcome that distinction of "for Us but not for Them" created and affirmed with the very document that declared our national commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our nation's birth announcement was just pretty words - like the studio portrait of a happy family that hides heinous sins of abuse and pain.

Kara's post keeps me walking though. Our Founding Fathers were individuals. All had their own personal stories of abuse and liberty. What they signed together as a group gave birth to a single being, the United State of America, made up of individuals all with their own personal stories. The Fifteenth Amendment makes no mention of Frederick Douglass nor does the Nineteenth Amendment mention Lucretia Mott. But without the unwavering personal stories of these Giants, the national lies may have remained even longer uncorrected.

In speaking about the privileges of her own life, Kara states:

"Now let me explain something. I was not born when the stage version of HAIR hit the scene. I was 8 years old when the film was released. My mom was not a hippy, but a single mother working as a Head Start teacher trying to make the ends meet. This phenomenon was not on my radar within the context of its own time.

It was not until the late 1980's, when as a college student at Carnegie Mellon University, I saw this film for the first time, screened for our critical theory class. This was not my reality. Rather, this was the myth of Giants. Yet, somehow the reality I had created around myself was due to the work of these mythic beings. My cultural reality, the context of my life was somehow in play because of the things these Giants did to fight for freedom."

It was the personal footsteps of all the Giants, both named and unrecognized who kept putting one foot in front of the other, living life according to what they knew to be most true that so has overwhelmed me in the last several days. As the cameras panned the huge, peaceful crowd in that Chicago park, I saw in those individual faces all the ancestors who had made this day possible. The gate of change was held open by them. And millions of individual Americans finally undid the Founding Fathers' institutional lie of "all men".

Now we are on the "After" side of the gate. Certainly I do not believe that the personal stories of all Americans have miraculously shifted to the possession of life, liberty, and happiness. I was not being casual when I stated that I was 100% cynical of the political process. I am however, 100% idealistic about the power of personal stories. I believe that we have finished a monumental task. Now we begin another. As Kara says so perfectly, "There is no magic bullet. Life as a human being doesn't get done or finish. We die. Our work becomes the Myth of Giants for those left living. But the re-creation of reality, the constant revision of life itself, this goes on, ceaselessly. Whatever "happy ending" we all though we were racing toward since the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, well, there is no ending. There is only beginning."

Another favorite blog writer, Sharon Astyk, sharpens this point:

"The man we have made President may or may not rise to the difficult circumstances he faces. I hope and pray he does. And whether he does in part depends on us. If we make it necessary, if we become great, well, perhaps he will follow. Or perhaps it won’t matter that much if he doesn’t.

"We are told over and over again that the American people will not sacrifice, that they are lazy, they lack courage, they are not the equals of the people who came before us and gave us pieces of a history worth believing in. I do not know what kind of president we have, but I know, if I know any thing in the world that that last is a slander, a lie.

Each of us has the capacity to become greater than we are at present, to invoke the power of past generations, and past acts of heroism, and become what we need to be - the people who will preserve an America worth loving. So far, most people still don’t quite realize what is needed, but I have faith that if we choose, we who have coasted on cheap energy and plenty of wealth will find in ourselves that we are not so very far removed from our past, and that we are tied in the soils and by our courage to a future worth having. I have hope that we can create an America and an American people so deeply worth loving that our current and future leaders are shaped and transformed and burnished in greatness, as we transform and burnish ourselves."

I offer one more quote from the man whose personal story will indeed be noted in the history books:

"And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright --tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

For that is the true genius of America -- that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow."

I am a Giant. My husband is a Tall Tale. Our children's lives are Mythic. Each one of us are not only descendants of those with unimaginable tales of courage, pain, and triumph. We will be the Ancestors. And this is the most important job title of all. What reality, what American Dream will we craft for our children's children?