My Opening Farewell

Suddenly it’s so hard to find
The sound of the words to speak her troubled mind,
So I’m offering these to her as if to be kind:
There’s a train everyday leaving either way;
There’s a world, you know.
There’s a way to go,
And you’ll soon be gone – that’s just as well.
This is my opening farewell.
~Jackson Browne
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My family and I will be leaving DC tomorrow for the inauguration. We’ll be staying two or three nights out in the mountains and return when the most chaotic part of the political circus has gone back home.

A lot of people have asked me why we would choose to make our collective exodus for such an historic event. The simplest answer is convenience and safety. The city will be flooded with people, and beginning at midnight tomorrow, all the bridges will be closed. Even during normal workdays, it’s hard for us to find anywhere to put our cars, as we have no garage or back yard and are not permitted to park on the side-streets – we live on one of the city’s main streets. It would be an absurd task to so much as go down to the grocery store. Add to that the fact that the city will be as fortified as it can be made, and many of its exits blocked... we simply do not wish to be around for it.

But for my part, I have reasons more jaded. I have never been a great fan of political fervor, and the emphasis being mounted on this event makes me ill. Historic it will be indeed. And a shift in the direction of this country was, without a doubt, necessary. But I believe the real historical event will be a day people may not recognize at all, and one I probably will not live to see. It will come when we, as a society, elect a PERSON to the presidency who will be to us a leader first, regardless of whether they are black or white, gay or straight or bisexual or asexual, man or woman or transgendered, childless or a parent of many, Christian or Jewish or Muslim or atheist or Buddhist or Wiccan or members of a dragon-worshipping Druidic sect who all put on lingerie and shake their booties to Queen songs every Wednesday night in the parking lot of a holy abandoned bowling alley.

We will remember Obama’s inauguration the way we remember our children’s first words. It will be something precious, but it will not be the defining moment that shapes our nation any more than the first time I got my 17-month-old goddaughter to say “please” is indicative to me of who she will be as an adult. We are showing that we are not longer the world’s infant nation throwing tantrums for our black milk. We as people are growing up, but we have not yet evolved.

The real historic day will come when we learn to see each other as people first. It will come when equality under the law means equality under the law. It will come when we obliterate categories of people as standards of judgment. It will come the day we elect a person to our Presidency and the first thought in our minds is not “Wow, a lesbian President!” but rather,

“We have chosen well.”