I was supposed to be a Republican. It was an unspoken fact (though still a fact) in my hometown. Republicans were the moral ones who upheld our Southern Baptist values. They were kind and grandfatherly, familiar with their slight southern drawls. They did not have sexual relations with that woman. They did their job, which was to give long and boring speeches on TV that affected me in no way whatsoever and then carry on with whatever they did in that white house. No one in my family cared much about politics—it was never a topic discussed over meals—but I got the point, from church and from school, about whose side we were on. (And of course I’m generalizing, and of course there were people in my town with different beliefs and opinions, but as a child, I did not know those people. As a child, this is what if felt like.) Even in high school after I understood that there were issues apart from religious ones and that presidential candidates were individual people instead of cutouts of their parties, I couldn’t bring myself to care about politics.
The first time I heard of Barack Obama was during my senior year of high school. I don’t remember ever hearing so much about a candidate before—the adults couldn’t stop talking. Barak Obama was secretly a Muslim plotting against our country, I heard many of them say. He wasn’t even American—he had no birth certificate to prove he was, or if he did it was fake. He looked suspiciously happy in pictures. But what mattered most was that he was evil. Evil. Not evil like, oh, that evil teacher keeps giving me detention, but evil in the Biblical sense, like the evil that we should be deeply, instinctively afraid of. So many people said this with confidence, and surely they knew something I did not. I was treading dangerous ground anyway, asking too many questions, doubting opinions I’d always been told to have. I took AP Government that spring, and in class we researched all of the candidates for the election the next fall. Obama looked shockingly young. He didn’t look evil. I also remember taking one of those “I Side With” quizzes in class and getting Obama and not knowing how to feel about it. I was tapping hard from inside a conservative shell, the outside of which seemed tempting and terrifying. It was hard to know what was my opinion and what was placed on me by someone else.
I went to college in the fall of 2008. Until then, I had never known a person my age to care about politics. But my classmates felt so strongly about what they believed that they were willing to knock on strangers doors to tell them.I don’t think I’d ever heard of canvassing before or met anyone who volunteered for a campaign. I didn’t know that people could volunteer for campaigns. I had never met people with this kind of passion and never heard this side of the argument. I kept quiet and listened, the way I’d listed to the adults who told me that man is evil. I realized that I’d known I would vote for Obama all along, but I’d needed to get out of that cage, needed to be sure. I wondered what my family would think, if they’d be disappointed or horrified. But by the time I figured out the absentee process, it was too late to vote. (Mississippi has a notoriously difficult absentee voting process.) I regret it still.
I remember watching as votes came in on election night. Before he was even declared the winner, students started flooding the Main Green. I stood on the steps of the John Carter Brown Library, watching thousands of students cheering, crying, dancing, and setting off illegal fireworks in celebration. Some of my friends climbed onto the balcony of Faunce House and hung a sign they’d made as everyone cheered. Maybe I’d never seen real joy until this moment. My best friend, Sam, called me from Chicago where she was watching his speech live in Grant Park. I could hear the crowds cheering around her. There were some things I already knew at that point that I would never forget. Where I was when I heard about 9/11. When Hurricane Katrina hit my town. And when Barack Obama won the 2008 election. “Yes we can,” my classmates screamed from the Faunce steps. Yes, we can.
Four years later, I visited my two best friends in Chicago a couple of months before the 2012 election. One of them was working for the Obama campaign, so he gave me a tour of the headquarters. Everyone there was so young, some even younger than I was. They were volunteers, sleeping on couches and doing this work for free because they believed so strongly in things that mattered. And Obama believed in young people. In my four years of college, he’d taught me and my generation that our opinions mattered, that we could make a real difference in the country. Before I was 18-years-old, no one had ever told me that. As a 22-year-old, he’d made me believe it. I finally got to vote for him that year, in my hometown, where I no longer cared in the slightest that I would be shunned if people knew. I knew exactly what I believed, and I did not need them to tell me.
9 years later and many people back home still hate the Obamas. I’ve heard racial slurs about him and his family that you may believe only exist today in Faulkner novels and surely not real life. I cannot tell you why they hate him— maybe because of his skin color, his stance on an issue, his political party, or just because someone told them to—but they must not have spent these 8 years watching the same man that I have. I watched a man who believed in art and compassion and humility and kindness and respect and equality and laughing and having faith in people. I watched a man full of hope and love and never hesitant to show it.
I am grateful that Obama was president during my college and grad school years, the years when I was figuring out what I truly believed and stopped listening to what I’d been told to think for most of my life. The years when I started caring about politics and understanding how it affects me. I’m grateful to have had a president and first lady who were not just figures on a TV screen but true role models. I’m grateful that I had a president who made me feel like my opinions mattered, like all of our opinions mattered. I’m grateful that I had a president who inspired me.
Obama believed in my generation. He believed that young adults could impact the world. And then he proved that we could.
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