Who I Voted For

You know when you just gotta do something? When everything builds up and feels just really strong and powerful and you gotta do something? That's how I feel right now. And I decided, I need to write.

There's an incredible mix and swarm of emotions inside me. Like my insides are a big cauldron and a crazy leprechaun dumped in all the colors of the rainbow and is swirling them around, over and over and over again with his big wooden mixing spoon. Like a pack of ambitious Amish are making their year's worth of butter in there. Like Barack Obama and George Bush and everything else I've ever known are at a pool party, all trying to mingle, some of them rather unsucessfully.

My God, where do I start? Barack Obama got elected. We elected him. The students and the youth that never ever vote voted. Left and right people are saying I voted for the first time and they're saying it with pride. I want to cry when I think about what Obama said last night, about the 106 year old black woman in Atlanta, Georgia who stood in line to cast her vote, a woman born a generation past slavery, who lived through Jim Crow and signs on public establishments saying "Your skin's pigments are a different color, you can't enter," who saw Martin Luther King Jr. with his message of peace and freedom and justice captivate a people and a nation and then get assassinated, a woman who saw schools integrated and a country change its laws and start to change its character, even if it took an eternity.

"Yes we can," he shouted and they repeated over and over again last night, an orator of the caliber of Frederick Douglas and MLK Jr., a pastor carrying his church because they wanted to, needed to, believe.

It was incredible, as us 10 gringos sat around our house, glued to the television and computers wildly finding poll updates and funny clips of John Stewart. Incredible in that we watched a truly historic moment filled with so much hope and jubilation and promise. Incredible in that we all collectively passed a serious moment of nostalgia, of homesickness, of wanting to be where the action was, where are country was.

There are some moments, like when you find out your sister is pregnant and his having another boy, when your friends are going through a tough time and they need a hug, when you need a hug, that you really wish you could be there. This was another of those times.

And when you get past that lump in your throat, it's a beautiful feeling. It means we love that place, those people. It means finally we can get past this collective generational sense of shame that we live in a country looked down upon by so many other places, that when we tell people here we're from the U.S. the first two questions we hear are "what about Bush?" and "isn't the U.S. too racist to elect black Obama?" That we can say now, "I am American, and my goodness we have screwed up a lot, but a nation of people, the people that have never before made the difference, are clamoring and saying Yes We Can."

That, to me, is the true beauty in all this. Obama's message of hope, of change. Yes, as a country, we have done some seriously shitty things. As people, each one of us, has struggled, had pains, at times dealt with all of our conflicting feelings about ourselves, about the the world we live in. Who among us has not said, "I don't want to be myself right now?" One of the few political issues I feel seriously passionate about is gay marriage, and the U.S. collectively said no to it last night, my home state said no. It fills me right now with this pit in my stomach, this knowledge that we continue to discrimate, however we want to call it, however we want to justify it.

But am I not discrimating too, as I look down on what I perceive as their discrimation? As I live in a country and even a house that overwhelmingly doesn't support gay marriage or even just being gay, how do I deal with this? In thinking about this, in truly feeling this out, I have come to one conclusion:

To love them.

To love them? Yes, to love them. To love the people, to love everyone, for who they truly are inside, apart from all the things that society piles up on us, that people pile up on us, that we pile up on ourselves.

Jonathon Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach says it better than I can:

(fletcher): "I don't understand how you manage to love a mob of birds that has
just tried to kill you."
"Oh, Fletch, you don't love that! You don't love hatred and evil, of
course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one
of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That's what I mean by
love. It's fun, when you get the knack of it.”

One of the hardest and perhaps most important things in the world is to love when it seems the hardest. To love your fellow people, to love yourself, when part of them hates, when part of them discriminates. To realize we're all in this together, that none of us is better than anyone else. We just are, we just are, and we're all doing the best that we know how in this moment. How can we not love this, love all these follies, love every single moment we try and get knocked down and get back up again and again and again? "Joyful participation in the sorrows of life," as the Tibetan proverb goes.

That's what Jesus, Ghandi, MLK Jr. did. That is how true incredible inspired beautiful change happens, through a loving embracing forgiving accepting spirit that holds all of the world in its heart, all of the perceived good and bad and everything else, and says, "I can hold you, and I can love you, because I know what you really are, I know what you're really made of."

So as the television channels show the blue and red states and all these interesting statistics and breakdowns and numbers, who voted for who, I just hope, from the very bottom of my heart, that we all, in our own ways, vote for love, tolerance and celebration, and embracing. Because in the end, in the very end of things, from where else does it stem? What else truly matters?

I end with a Tibetan prayer, given to me by Kalen, that says exactly what I want to say:

"May all beings everywhere, with whom we are inseparably interconnected,
be fulfilled, awakened, and free. May there be peace in this world and
throughout the entire universe, and may we all together complete the
spiritual journey."

Love peoples,
Ryan