My Heart

On November 4^th 2008 at 11:25pm everyone was ecstatic celebrating like there was no tomorrow. For the first time in my 22 years and for the first time in this great country’s long history we have a black president. The campus was exploding in shouts of jubilation accomplishment, hugs, handshakes, and victory dances. While all of this went on I cried. It started off as subtle tears of happiness, but before long they transformed into soul shattering heart piercing sobs. I began to cry like never before and I could not stop.

This election meant way more to me than I could have ever known, but despite every scenario that ran through my head, I would have never expected to react the way that I did when it was announced that Obama had won. I have never been one to put all of my hope and faith into one person. In my heart of hearts I have always felt that we are the ones that dictate our own futures, and that we were the ones who should push and motivate our selves. But after years of doing it alone and feeding off of the motivation to rise up from where I came from, I found myself second guessing everything.

I started to look around and see all of my friends who had graduated from college but were working at H&M. I looked at my father who has worked since he was 11 years old, when he retired things were supposed to be different this was supposed to be his chance to enjoy life. Instead I am forced to watch my 60+ year old father walk out of his one bedroom basement apartment every night to go work his overnight shift. So while you have senior citizens who work to stay occupied, my father must work to survive. Despite all of his years of hard work, social security alone would not keep a roof over his head. I became numb to the sights and sounds of people my age in the same institution as I am, unable to write beyond the third grade level. I slowly began to make excuses and instead of seeing the solutions, I found it easier to pinpoint the problems. Life can be sobering when watching failure through the eyes of the ones you love the most. It hurts because you feel for your friends, and when reality hits and you understand that their fate can just as easily be yours, the idea that change is possible becomes a faint thought in the midst of your battle to survive. So when it was time to sit and do homework, I would stare at the paper trying to will words that would get me through another week of homework, but the only thing that would come out was the question that I had already tortured myself with for so long. “What for”? Why work so hard when I am more likely to be in the same position that I am in now if not worse. Why fight for student rights when it seems like no one else is willing to join in the fight, why try to educate people on their history, how can someone appreciate the past when they don’t even acknowledge their present.

I struggled with this for days, weeks and months, but no matter how hard I tried to hide this feeling of defeat it became harder and harder every day. So on November 4^th 2008 I stood at Suny Oldwestbury’s TV game room talking to a group of students preaching to them about a future that I was no longer sure of, hoping that through my words I could give them faith, and through their faith that my hope could be reborn, and just when it seemed like I was speaking in vain, the results came in, Barack Obama was the first African American President of the United States. So while everyone went crazy I stood there in shock, thinking about every moment where I felt nothing mattered, the hot mid- summer afternoons when I tried to take out a student loan to pay for summer classes but didn’t have good enough credit. Then I think about the day when my father told me I was living in a world of restrictions because I was a black man, and when I finally come to only about a second has passed, but it’s enough time for me to realize that nothing will ever be the same again.

The glass ceiling is broken, and hard work does pay off. You may not always inspire at the moment but as long as you plant the seed something will happen, and most of all if you never give up on the heart of people they will someday pay you back for your faith. I was ready to give up on my goals, I was one step away from falling into the same trap I worked so hard to avoid, and with the election of one man, I saw in that instant that everything is going to be ok. I don’t know when things will be ok, and I don’t know how it will happen, but god as my witness everything is going to be ok. So when that first tears slid down my cheek and I saw students of all class standings, backgrounds, races, religious beliefs and life motives hugging like they always knew each other. I knew there was hope for me and for everyone else in this world. So as long as I keep on fighting there will always be hope in this world. Obama won the election but in the process he along with every American man woman and child in this beautiful country gave me back something that I had been missing for a long time, my heart.