Article: A poem maybe... heard somebody say...

I heard somebody say -
I never knew what it felt like to be an American!

I heard somebody say -
Now I can tell my baby girl: You can be anything you want to be.

I heard somebody say -
When we used to sing We Shall Overcome, I never thought we actually would!

And you say he's just one man?
You think he's somebody's puppet?
That the Mysterious Ones Who Control Everything anointed him to lull us back to sleep again?

Maybe you have forgotten, after only a few years of darkness, what some people had only ever known as a Dream, once spoken on pain of death, never again to be stuffed back down their throats with bullets and truncheons and the noose.

Maybe Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush and their gang of bullyboys held you in shock and awe while these others saw only the familiar return of dog and boot and murder, after those few bright moments on the Mall of our past.

But some have been down a long road without any other flickering light but a Dream to comfort them, as had their parents and their parents' parents beyond memory. To them did not come free speech and open dissent and the power to vote, much less elementary school, without a bloody fight and a losing battle.

Are you so sure, when these, with such hard-earned knowledge, give him their trust, place their future in his young hands? Are they but fools and bumpkins so unlearned and unsophisticated that they would fall yet again for the lure of full citizenship, full humanity?

I think not; I think some of us have known for a long time, what to look for in a man and woman we will call the First among us. We recognize something we have harbored and cherished for generations while the world belonged to other kinds of men.