Yes We Can; Yes We Did

from NewsOne

Yes We Can--Yes We Did
by Mark Anthony Neal

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Though not usually given to emotional outbursts, I was confused as I found myself tearing-up while watching “Yes, We Can.” I was caught even more off-guard as my daughter asked me why I was crying.

Although I make my living by “having an answer for everything” I was quite frankly at a loss for words. But then I imagined the world that my 72-year-old father lived in when he was 9-years-old, knowing at the time that there was little chance that he could ever vote, let alone vote for somebody who looked like him.

I was only a little older than my daughter is now when my father did cast his first ballot in 1976 for Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter.

I could also remember the first time I pulled the lever — voting for Reverend Jesse Jackson in the New York Democratic convention in 1984 and how good so many of us felt — giving each other sly winks—as we walked in and out of the voting site, knowing full well that our vote in that primary was little more than a symbolic gesture of pride.

As I struggled for language to give my daughter, I realized also that for her and many of her peers, Barack Obama’s campaign is nothing extraordinary (she has made more of the fact that a “girl” has never been president).

And while there will be many difficult conversations in the future between us about the disenfranchisement of convicted felons, Diebold machines and voting irregularities, it is this sense of normalcy that I guess ultimately triggered my emotions in response to the “Yes We Can” video. It’s a normalcy that my father could never imagine — a normalcy that as a teenager I had long learned not to ever expect.

Obama’s 13 victories on Super Tuesday gets him no closer to his party’s nomination and thus no closer to the presidency, but as I again watch “Yes, We Can” and again tears well-up in the eyes, I can swear that what I am really hearing are generations of folk who came before us whispering “Yes, you did.”

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