Redemption Is

Redemption is the 14th Amendment

It is Brown v Board of Education of Topeka

It is Reagan apologizing to Japanese-Americans who had been unjustly interned.

It is vindication of the notion that we can do the right thing after having done so much wrong, that the heartache over the wrongs of your own country could be reversed, redeemed. That we can be made whole again.

In a way, Obama's election as president-elect was not redemption, but merely a promise of one. There is a long way for our country, my country, to right the wrongs that had been committed in its name, against the world and against ourselves.

Yet his election is a redemption in a symbolic sense. And things symbolic are trite, irrelevant and yet are the cultural currencies that bind 300 million disparate human beings together. Presidential elections are the collective civic communion that we partake, tiny little revolutions every 4 years. If Americans are most segregated on Sunday mornings, as we go to our own churches and temples and such, then the first Tuesday of every fourth November is when we are the most together.

And for me, there is a certain sense of redemption that the White House, originally built on the backs of slaves, will have as its First Lady one of their descendants in 3 months. It is a homecoming centuries in the making.

It is also redemption that this election moved a 90-year old African American woman to break down tears because she never thought she would live to see a day like this.

And it is also redemption that America is once again the land of possibilities, that you don't need old family money to send you to elite prep schools and legacy spots in ivy league colleges for doors to be opened to you, that a man is elected as president neither because or in spite of his skin, but because he's the most competent.

Congratulations, President-elect Barack Obama