Nervous Energy Shadows Moment Of History

FEARS OF OBAMA UPSET TRUMPS FOCUS OF HIS MOMENT IN HISTORY

election'08: the race to clean the place

Americans across the United States will saddle up next voting machines less than 48 hours from now.

Behind those curtains, many will vote their convictions, the fears and their hopes. It can be said voters will pull levers or punch cards during one of our country's most tenuous moments. Pocket books are bare and the likelihood of filling them seem bleak. The terrorists are still out there, but they still need a willing president to stoke our fears.

These are the reasons people will vote Tuesday. All politics is local and whether your household finances are in order or not, you can't get anymore local that.

But, there is more to this particular election day that is being loss among the squeamishness of certain Democrats bent on willing themselves to believe their man could lose.

On Tuesday night, American may have elected a black man as its leader.

The sheer enormity of that sentence will ultimately tower in history over anything that possibly plays out election day.

Greil Marcus, writing in Salon today wrote:

My whole life, my upbringing, education, travel and talk, from working in Congress as an intern at the height of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s to every election in which I've ever voted, makes it all but impossible for me to believe that, on Tuesday, a single state will turn its face toward the face of a black man and name him president of the United States.

It's sort of like wondering how it will feel, as a child born in the 70s, how life would change on January 1, 2000--the dawn of a new century. Nothing really changed, but the day was filled with awe and whimsy.

Will Tuesday be any different? The country will go on as did the day before, hopefully, it gets better in the four years, but the bureaucracy will trudge on.

Mentally, the "I never thought I would see this in life time" mantra will pervade the nation. Likely entering the societies lexicon the same way people remember where they were when President Kennedy was assassinated or when man first walked on the Moon.

Where were you when America elected a black man President of the United States? More importantly, where were you when American once again outsmarted the rest of the world and showed it promise.