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Straight from the White House: America's new holiday card
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The White House earlier this week
As our president-elect oversees the transition, a lot of folks are happily adjusting to new images more in keeping with the very ethics of Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas. There was the retiring white president and his wife, scion of blue blood and Texas, warmly inviting the new president, Kenyan-Hawaiian, and his wife to tour the not-so-blanched White House anymore.
This magnificent irony was on my mind when I spoke to one of my adolescent classmates from back in 1968, just after Barack Obama handily won the presidency.
We had endured so much together, as 15-year-olds that year, 1968, including the assassinations, the Vietnam bloodshed, the urban riots, the explosive Democratic convention in Chicago that – minus the assassinated Sen. Robert F. Kennedy – nominated the party standard-bearer, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. We had walked to an urban high school day in and day out, both exhilarated and afraid, as our nation recoiled in conflict and the one thing we could have never imagined in the spring of 1968, as Dr. King was buried in Atlanta and Bobby Kennedy next to his brother in Arlington, Va., was that lightning would appear within our lifetimes and that a black man would decisively win the White House.
We remembered that other breathtaking Christmas image—when the three astronauts of Apollo 8 circled the moon, sent us back the first-ever images of a pristine blue earth, and crowned that bitter year with some genuine healing prayer from above.
“Who would have thought?” My old buddy exclaimed. We were two middle-aged men on the telephone, pondering something unimaginable 40 years ago when, within eight weeks, we lost our two signal heroes that summer, MLK and RFK.
My friend's sentiment was palpable, and I heard the painful cry of history being released, like a millstone, across the phone lines. Suddenly, it wasn't all in vain – the shootings of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Dr. King, and so many others whose names are only known to God. Suddenly, it wasn't about the superficial and financially driven plethora of brand-name black athletes selling deodorants, cars, sneakers, beer, and pension portfolios on television. It wasn't window dressing or affirmative action or quota-filling. It was real, thrilling and, though it was a political campaign, it ultimately was dignified. It smacked of reconciliation; it’s the bellwether of an uncommon festival.
It also proved that in America, 40 years after the moon was first beamed into our homes, lightning flashed across the plains and the mountains with the incandescence of hope. Barack Obama was not really the first one to declare, “Yes, we can.” But he was first one to say it, with black skin, and to win the tentative rewriting of American holiday dreams.
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