President Obama


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November 5th 2008
Published: November 11th 2008
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As a true political junky I was given the best possible gift today. My coworkers allowed me to stay home all morning and watch the CNN converage of the US election results. Being 12 hours ahead of the coverage I crawled out of bed early, cooked myself a big breakfast and watched the last hours of November 4th unfold in the United States in my pajamas.

And I admit, I was stunned as I watched more and more states come in blue. After watching the NDP loose time and time again at home, I didn't really believe that Barak Obama could pull it off. Now the Liberals reading this can stop huffing, I did not just comparing Jakc Layton to Barak Obama. It's not a leaders thing (although it is understandable these days if Liberals don't know how to seperate politics from their leader *wink*). I didn't really think Obama would win because so often in the last few years I have watched the left wing surge forward with hope and entusiasm, believing that this time we had finally reached the population, only to have the right wing sweep past us. I don't know about other people from the left, but lately I feel like society has been overrun by selfish, old white men and their selfish, old white men political organizations. I had stopped believing that we could beat them.

So I have been holding my breath through out this election. I hadn't even realized how much I had been holding my breath, how afraid I had been that the right would steel it all again, how deeply I didn't want those fears to come true, until CNN declare his victory. I let out that breath finally, and then cried. Infact, I sobbed.

I wasn't sobbing for Obama. Though he seems like a wonderful leader. It thrills me to see so much popular support for a politician who is not only intelligent, but who also speaks to the general population as if they are intelligent. And I love a politician who is brave enough to stand up and say, "I am going to be honest with you." And this morning Barak Obama did just that. As an activist it is also so exciting to see barriers being broken. Sometimes it seems like we work and work and work without seeing any positive change. Today I was so happy for all of my activist brothers and sisters in the civil rights movement, who saw change in their lifetime, whose work has made a real difference.

It was precisly becasue I am an activist that I sobbed this morning as I watched Barak Obama give his acceptance speech.

I lost the last of my faith in North Americans this year. After all that I have seen and felt in the last few years I finally stopped having faith in Canadians and Americans both - because from this side of the world, we don't look that different and we don't seem so seperate. I know that there are a lot of good people in both countries who work tirelessly to make the world a better place. But I had lost hope in the majority in both countries. Populations who have consistently voted right wing - who have allowed their governments to cut important social services, to make discriminatory immigration laws, to abuse entire populations through free trade and economically disasterous aid criteria. Last year I watched Canadians care more about an abandoned panda then the hundreds of thousands of people all over the world suffering from famine, drought, human rights abuses, ect. This year I have fought public disinterest in Canada to try to bring attention to the horrifyng things that Canadian mining companies are doing to Filipinos. I have honestly been nervous about coming home and trying to be an activist amongst this population again.

I have become more jaded here against my own people then I had realized was possible. Because I have had to explain a hundred times to coworkers here that lobbying the populations at home and in the US to help us in our cause was not really going to work. Becasue those populations just don't care. Because the Philippines is just one out of 198 countries in the world who come knocking on our doors asking for attention, effort and money. My people have closed thier ears.

But Obama's win gives me hope. It gives me hope to see how many Americans mobalized for a cause they believed in. How many Americans listened at the door, not just about what he would do for them, but what his administration wanted to do for the whole country. It gave me hope to see people talking about what an America under his administration could do for the world. All of this through community organizing. Because people talked and other people listened. Because his campaign team recruited millions of volunteers, and because those volunteers took the concerns of the people back to the top and because that is what created policy. I was shown this morning that North Americans can be moved beyond apathy and selfishness. I cried today watching 240 000 people crowd into Grant Park, those people are the hope, they are the people who chose to care.

If it can be done in the US, it can be done at home. It can be done all over the world. People can be moved. And we can move them.

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