Friday, June 26, 2015, for me started early (as usual) — that would be around 5a.m. I felt a bit morose because it’s my mother’s birthday: although she’s been dead for ten years, missing her presence is still raw and sharp. Usually my sister and I talk and reminisce on Mom’s birthday, but my sister is on vacation. As are most of my friends. And it’s hot as hell here.
So the day didn’t start all that well. Errands (grocery, bank) accomplished before 10a.m., when the temperature starts flirting with 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Back home. Turn on the TV because why not have some companionable noise other than groans of overworked air conditioning?
Then: breaking news (for once, actual breaking news). The Supremes have ruled, narrowly but absolutely decisively, on marriage equality. All fifty states! Bam! So happy for LGBT friends and for the country. I’d guessed that the less sweeping option (mandating that non-gay-marriage-rights states must honor gay marriages performed in other states) might be the verdict. Glad I guessed wrong!
Enjoying watching people celebrate, reading the actual decision plus the say-whut dissenting opinions (particularly the head-scratching, logic-defying one by Clarence Thomas and the Don-Rickles-on-a bad-day riff by Antonin Scalia — guess he and Justice Kennedy are not BFF).
Still sweltering. Upcoming on the TV is Barack Obama’s eulogy for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a man the President knew, the most nationally prominent of last week’s victims of the sickening murders at Charleston SC’s Emanuel AME church.
Must watch. For one reason, the whole event — from massacre to stunning statements of forgiveness to Confederate battle flag disavowals — has been totally head-spinning (I’ve tried to write about some of it, but events torque faster than one can respond to). For another, with all the calls to ‘address race’ (as if Barack Obama has not done so for the past eight years, as if he doesn’t by his very being), I wonder how he will handle this delicate and important assignment. Which, at its core, is a funeral/homecoming for a specific individual, but which also seems to call for some sort of policy statement or statements, plus acknowledgment of the stunning, swiveling events of the past week.
This was the most brilliant, beautiful, moving speech I’ve ever had the opportunity to watch, to listen to, or read, or access in whatever way current technology allows one to do.
Although not raised in an historically ‘Black church’ environment, President Obama demonstrated that he not only knows but also has internalized its history, its pride, its cadences, its activism, its communalism, its suffering, its traditions of performance. Amazing grace. I found myself choking up, then crying, which — believe me — I don’t do often.
What’s more, the President was able to weave authentic tributes to the Reverend Pinckney with calls for social and legislative change (voting rights, sensible gun regulation, eradication of hiring bias, policing reform).
Watching this speech, at this event, reminded me of watching another speech on the occasion of another event — Barack Obama’s 2008 inaugural. That January, I (like many others on the East Coast) was snowed in. Plans to enjoy that event with friends were scuttled because no one could get out of his or her driveway. So I watched it alone — still amazed that my country actually had elected a smart, cool, non-white, non-war-mongering person — and found myself choking up, then crying.
Today, Barack Obama was the man and President most of us (probably including Obama himself) hoped he would be. Only a man of subtle intelligence and profound empathy, no matter what his race, could give the speech. Only a man who has been subject to crazed, vitriolic calumny could understand the ethic of forgiveness so achingly voiced by the Charleston massacre victims’ survivors, just a few days ago.
And today, it seems that it would be possible for at least some racial attitudes and their systemic institutionalizations (maybe even some attitudes about gun violence, and unequal education, and a corporate-sponsored incarceration regime) to change in substantive ways. That we could care about our fellow citizens’ health, as well as our own. That we would celebrate loving each other and not judge the paths that love takes. That it wouldn’t be so hard to name the mistakes, yes, the crimes, of our history instead of weaving feel-good myths about them. That our country could aspire to a state of grace.
This photo shows the President beginning to sing "Amazing Grace." Here's a link to the President's eulogy for Clementa Pinckney: http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4542228/president-obama-eulogy-clementa-pinckney-funeral-service
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