I find myself in a rare state lately…

I would consider myself to be a champion of logic. My core belief structure is based in that all ideas have equal value until they are properly presented and dissected. But when discussing politics lately I find myself irrationally motivated… I find that I am so emotionally invested in one possible outcome, that my country can elect Barack Obama, that I have trouble even considering other outcomes. I feel some worth in that I can at least acknowledge this – and while it still troubles me – it at the same time emboldens me. In the past few weeks I have had the opportunity to surround myself with many like minded people, and I have discovered we all seem to have this affliction. The only similar irrationality I can find in my brief autobiography is probably related to love, and that is telling as well. All of us, this grand thing in common, all head over heels for this idea.

The term that originally seemed to define this candidacy was first “once in a generation”, eventually now “once in a lifetime”. And I have no real way of knowing if this is indeed true or not, having not been alive to believe in a Lincoln, FDR, RF or ML K. But that is what it feels like. That is what my gut tells me every time my heart rises and falls based on what appears to be happening in the race. Since the moment I fell in love with American History, I have been waiting for something to happen in my lifetime. Something important that my kids will read about and I will have been there myself, will have done something myself. And I have felt a fresh piece of the Berlin Wall in my fingers, I have paid true attention at the foot of the tangled ruins of ground zero, I have spoken out against the war before it was a war, but nothing has ever felt as crucial as this. To be a modern American, raised on the optimism of your high school textbooks but faced with the cynicism and ideological deadlock of the status quo, I think all of us yearn for something we can get behind. Americans want to believe in something greater than themselves, they want to be given a chance at playing their part in the textbooks of tomorrow and being on the right side of history. They just need a compelling reason, or figure from which to rally up.

Once week ago tomorrow, I sat at  results viewing party in North Conway, New Hampshire and watched in disbelief as our movement took its licks. And seeing tears in the eyes of people who share this belief is a polarizing event. You walk away ten times more resolved then you arrived. You want to put the whole thing on your bronze shoulders and carry it to fruition alone. But all you can do is work and work and most of all hope. And the riskiest part isn’t pouring your unbroken heart into it, it is allowing yourself to envision that enough people will also believe, just enough – to give what you are convinced is this gift to the American experiment. That change isn’t just a history lesson but a vibrant and impatient undercurrent to our shared experience.

So while I say, quite rationally, that my candidate is not just a rhetorical wonder, that he is in fact the future our country should be given the right to choose, that I have read his first book and finished every page in disbelief that we might actually get to have this real person as our president, a politician driven by principle and sincere civic duty and not by ego or greed or personal manifest destiny. I know these things are true. That this man would add another optimistic counterpoint in the chapters of our nation’s history. And I could cite or indeed publish essay after article to support this viewpoint, but I realize as well, that I am in fact now a Believer. And that my faith is impenetrable. Logic be damned and so be it. If this is once in a lifetime then we must make it count.

and Yes We Can.