Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Meditation While Drinking My Morning Coffee

I drank my coffee this morning before sunrise, as I always do, listening to the occasional outbursts from the rooster at the farm down the road, as I always do. And I thought about how things were changed now.

I got to see Sputnik go over in 1957. It is my earliest memory in this life; the memory probably stuck with me because my parents were making such a big fuss about it.

I got to watch Walter Cronkite intoning about how Russia had built some kind of weird wall splitting Berlin in two under cover of darkness.

I got to see that same wall come down, so many years later.

I got to see the best and the brightest minds of a generation gunned down one by one, turning so many Americans bitter and inward.

I got to see America lose a war, and then got to see America forget the lessons of that war and go charging into Iraq, flags flying, blissfully unaware that by doing so they were driving nails into the coffin of their fragile empire.

And now, this morning, this. A skinny black guy with a goofy grin and a funny name is my party's candidate for President of the United States of America. I feel old this morning. And I feel young.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

A certain lady would like to remind you that he is the presumptive nominee until August when the supers finally put their vote in stone. Now granted I'd like to remind a certain lady to just give it up already. :)

Stephen J. Gallagher said...

She has crossed the final boundary: from being parodied by others, to self-parody. I'm already cut-n-pasting choice snippets of her current doings to eventually evolve the post-election Hill&Bill menage into a stage play. The two of them, trapped for the rest of their lives in that big empty house up in NY, with no more contests or rallies or speeches. Just an endless eternity of empty time to fill .... together. I see it as Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff" meets Sartre's "No Exit." It'll work.