A Shot for Change

Bang! A shot rang out today from every corner of Iowa. That same shot is now ricocheting around every corner of the world. This very shot has the power to erase the tarnished images that our nation has been saddled with during the eight years of a unilateralist and unbending administration. By electing a skinny man out of Chicago with a funny name, a Kenyan father, and a single mother, this very shot carries with it the possibility of erasing the historical schisms which have divided Americans for too long and prevented us from working for our common cause.

In the streets of Des Moines, the schools of Cedar Falls and the churches of Waterloo, we witnessed white and black Americans, men and women, Americans of all stripes and political beliefs come together to work for a common purpose. I could not have foreseen four years ago the audacious infection that hope can inject into a people who were left uninspired by years of political warfare. We were peddled a solution for our common misfortunes by a politics espousing a 50 + 1% solution. Instead of realizing that our neighbors fears are the same as ours, that a red state anxiety is felt by a blue state equally, we were encouraged to view our fellow citizens as an adversary. Our nation was gripped by the malady of partisanship and a boiling over with the fever of exclusion.

What we failed to realize is that a fever is at its worse before it breaks; while the elections of 2000 and 2004 alienated the majority of Americans and balkanized the rest, the men and women of Iowa voted for a man who has the ability to move us past the polarizing debates of the past. For too long, we have let anger be the fuel that drives our politics. Washington has devolved into coliseum where we elect gladiators to wield blunt weapons of partisanship and myopia to shout and yell past each other—and in the end get nothing done. This anger, an anger which I felt deeply in 2004, was not getting us anywhere. We became a nation divided to the fringes, and the majority of Americans gave up on politics. Some were offering to combat myopia with obfuscation, to flip the tables and rule with a equal ferocity from a different spectrum. However, a coin which is flawed when it lands on tails is still flawed when it lands on heads. We cannot hope to sustain our democracy by simply replacing right wing exceptionalism with left wing exceptionalism.

Yet in the darkest moments, a beacon of light often guides the disillusioned towards the shores of hope. This beacon, a speech given by a man with a funny name in 2004, lit a fire under Americans who longed to be guided by a president who leads not by fear but by hope. We were moved by a man who inspires us to reach beyond anger and seek solutions based on a unity. We cannot hope to change the state of our country by replacing one form of partisanship with another. To the contrary, our democracy is devalued when we see our opponents as adversaries. We are not a country that needs more division, we are not lacking in people that can further partition our nation. Obama, in a speech at the Democratic National Convention, beseeched us to not be an America of blue states and red states; rather, he inspired us to fully value the true meaning of the United States of America.

It has been a long road, but my faith in our democracy has been restored and rekindled. Iowans tonight rejected a politics of division and instead coalesced around a politics of inclusion. Democrats, Independents, and Republicans all voted not only for one man, but for the hope and change that his campaign represents. This moment, while history is being written with the indelible ink of inspiration, presents us with a new path in our civic discourse. No longer will we only have a choice between enmity and disillusion; Iowa, with their spirit and unity, paved a new path of solidarity. With a ballot, not a bullet, Iowans took a shot at the status quo and delivered a might blow for change—a shot that is being heard around the world today.