This Is Our Last Time

Last night the Democratic Party made history by nominating the first major-party African-American candidate for President, Barack Obama.

Tonight, Barack Obama will accept our nomination. It is fitting that a 20,000 seat arena isn't remotely large enough to mark this moment. Even a 75,000 seat stadium will be too small and many will be turned away.

Rightwingers will mock the white columns. Everyone else in America and the world will marvel at the black man who stands before them.

Incredibly, it was the first viable feminist candidate, Hillary Clinton, who put him over the top. In that single act, the parallel lines of the civil rights and feminist movements met to transform American history.

And we did it through the oldest and largest political party in the world - the party that once fought civil rights - our party, the Democratic Party.

Barack Obama will stand firmly on the ground, but really he stands on the shoulders of giants. Traveling back in time we must recognize those who made his candidacy possible: presidential candidates Rev. Jesse Jackson and Shirley Chisholm, who broke the race and sex barriers to the presidency; presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, who put powerful blacks and women in their cabinets; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose vivid dream (45 years ago today, also in front of Greek columns) we are finally trying to realize; Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Marion Anderson (who sang in front of Greek columns); presidents Lyndon Johnson (born 100 years ago today), John Kennedy, Harry Truman, and Franklin Roosevelt, who dismantled American apartheid; Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who struggled for 72 years so women could vote; Harriett Tubman (quoted by Hillary Clinton) and Frederick Douglass, who were born into slavery and freed America's slaves; and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who gave us the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution with the Bill of Rights, the Democratic Party, and lots of beautiful Greek columns.

Of course none of those giants stood alone. Each rose to fame and power with popular movements, who fought in the streets and the battlefields, the voter registration offices and the voting booths for their controversial causes.

And to elect Barack Obama as our first African-American President, we who are alive today must do the same.

We Democrats were never really divided. But the Corporate Media wanted to make us look divided, and they had the power to project their Bie Lie into every American home. America's shared "reality" is nothing more than the image projected by the Wizards of Oz, the scheming profiteers at who hide behind their corporate curtains with the logos of FOX, NBC, and CNN.

Our truth-sniffing Toto's work in progressive media and blogs. They can pull back the curtains to expose the fraudulent Wizards, but it takes Dorothy's with brains, heart, and courage to find our way home. That means us - all of us.

So Barack Obama is our nominee, but this is our campaign. And we must understand the opposition we face.

We are up against the Republican Party, their corporate allies, and the Bush-Cheney-Rove White House, who will stop at nothing to keep progressive Democrats out of power, and hold them accountable for the crimes they committed over the past 8 years, including war crimes. 

And we are up against the enduring emotional power of racism, which will stop at nothing to keep an African-American family out of the Master Bedroom in the All-White House.

Like the suffragists and civil rights leaders, we must lock arms and march forward, and urge our fellow citizens to support us and even join us in our historic cause. They will be inundated with lies, but we must clearly repeat the truth.

The Republican plan is more disastrous war with Iran or Russia; less health care, education, justice and jobs; and environmental catastrophe. The Democratic plan is the opposite: ending war, more health care, education, justice and jobs; and saving the planet before it is too late. That is our choice, and it leaves us no choice.

In Berlin Barack Obama declared, "This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet.  Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.  Let us resolve that all nations - including my own - will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere.  This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one."

He concluded, "People of the world, this is our moment. This is our time."

But in reality, it may be our last time. So from now until the last vote is counted and re-counted by hand if need be, we must keep our eyes on the prize and do everything we can to win.