The optimist and the cynic (both within me)
My mother, who died just over 20 years ago at the relatively young age of 65, and who instilled in me both of my chief loves in life, music and Scrabble, wasn't the most careful of teachers.  As I grew through adolescence in the middle of the civil rights movement, insulated from the sometimes violent side of the struggle by my residence in the Bronx, NY part of the "tolerant" North, she displayed an ingrained cultural bias, both as a Jew and a white American that could have made me an out and out racist -- I never heard her say the word "nigger", but she used the Yiddish version of the term, "shvartze", pretty much without giving it any moment's thought.  Her distrust and contempt for them as neighbors (not on the same block at the time, but merely within a few blocks, as my public elementary school in easy walking distance was, and is, surrounded by a low-income housing project and I went to school with them) were clear.  Eventually that bias was one of the things that made me realize my born religion was no better than anyone else's.  Jews were supposed to be smarter, and have a greater interest in justice due to their history of being persecuted than goyim, but we were not immune to convincing ourselves that those "characteristics", among other things, made us superior people, and therefore capable of judging or merely living with the implicit understanding that others were inferior.

I honestly don't know what Gertrude Sherman's reaction would have been had she lived to see tonight's news.  I don't know how strong her conviction was that the equality this country has finally deemed fit to bestow upon people who clearly didn't need its seal of approval needed to reach this level.  I believe she supported the civil rights movement in spite of her bias.  I don't actually remember well enough what she may have said about it (if anything) when I was little.

What I do know is that I had grown proud as a youth to live in a country that was gradually granting inalienable rights to all human beings, and disappointed as more than a youth to see how slowly that still went.  In my twenties, I actually did not dare force myself to believe that I would live long enough to see a black President of the United States elected.  In my forties, I still did not, even as first Jesse Jackson and then Carol Moseley Braun and the clownish Al Sharpton finally became candidates seen and heard on the national stage.  My father had to live to 94 to see it!  I suppose tho, it was not as foremost in his mind of things he wanted to see before he dies, as it was in mine.  At any rate, the optimist in me appreciates that such a man as Barack Obama has been given the opportunity to lead us, and hopes that he will be allowed to fulfill the promises, of demonstrating the equality if not superiority of his abilities to those of presidents who have come before him, and bringing our nation closer together internally, and restoring our reputation externally.

The cynic in me still has to wonder, tho, would white America have been as ready to accept Obama enough to let him ascend the final step on the ladder if George W. Bush had not been the global disaster he is, and made it so easy to identify John McCain's party as the source of destruction and the enemy of hope?  All the talking heads on the telly are awfully busy expressing their pride in America for tearing down the race barrier to the White House, but I think it's a little early to be patting ourselves on the back.  I think any Democrat (alright, maybe not John Kerry) would have won this general election, and Barack Obama was just lucky to be in the right place at one of the worst of American times.  It was merely a coincidence he is black, tho perhaps that allowed him to galvanize the black voting block that would otherwise have been more generously split between the parties (thanks only to churches) for the Dems.  If I'd been born one generation later, maybe I would be less suspicious of the nation's motivations, for having seen less evidence of the residual hatred during my lifetime, less of just how hard it is for Americans to part with their prejudices.  OTOH, I would be just old enough to have seen how powerful a voting block could be fashioned out of what remains of those prejudices, because, after all, that's how we got 8 years of W.  And on a night when we elected a black man president, some parts of this country still showed how strong their ties to the dark ages are, by amazingly sending Michele Bachmann back to Congress, and maybe not so amazingly revoking gay marriage in California (last numbers I've seen indicated Prop 8 was passing [only the margin was astonishing], but this could have changed by the end of the night) even while the state showed a 60-38% preference for the President-elect.

Yes, a historical cataclysm occurred tonight, but the true measure of what has happened will be how Obama's administration comes to be represented in history after it ends.  His accomplishment as a politician has peaked, (with defeating Sen. Clinton; McCain was the easy part!), and now accomplishment as an executive and statesman must begin, lest the old prejudices are restored for several more decades and he becomes merely a speed bump in the white brick road.