Now Only One Day Left!

Unlike the great majority of Americans, I am reluctant to let loose my share of the hopes and dreams that will rise tomorrow in such overflowing abundance over the millions who will inundate the Nation's Capital and the inner Federal City, an area that, after so many years of absence, is still so familiar to me because I have criss-crossed it so often, mostly on foot but also by streetcar, bus, car, and invisible wings in my nighttime dreams.

There have been far too many bitter disappointments in the story ever since the first formerly free citizens of Africa stepped ashore in the English and Spanish colonies across the Atlantic, as slaves, and so began the most visible aspect of the question that had been central to American life ever since the first English and Spanish "settlers" arrived here a little earlier, and that question was and still is, shall the Master-Slave relationship be used and maintained? And that question has applied not only to the Old South but to many other areas of America life as well.

And, when all is said and done, it doesn't help that the history of B. Obama's forebears is mostly missing from the pages of American history in ways that that of the heavily and unjustifiably maligned Rev. Jeremiah Wright are not. That's a point that so many would very much like to overlook, or to forget, or never to realize in the first place, but I think it should always be kept in mind while the countless congratulations -- many of them inward directed -- and prayers of the next few days are being made.

Still, despite the torrents of refuse of many kinds that will be unloaded on the D.C. sewage and trash systems by such a huge number of freedom-loving citizens dropping down on it all at one time, tomorrow figures to be a far, far better day than it might have been, and lightyears more than any in the past eight years ...to the degree that any day at all on this beautiful globe is superior to any other.