Good thing my office door is closed so nobody can see me bawling my eyes out.

I want my country back.

We'll get it back, LFoD. We'll get it back.

Thank you Elvis, that is great. I grew up in Colorado and couldn't of been prouder of the 100,000 folks showin' up for the rally.
This grand gentleman is why I'm voting for Barak Obama. His grace and spirit needs to be enjoined and passed on.

Me too, LF. And I miss my dad a lot right now too.

Great post - love your writing, filled with colour, as always. If I may : I just wanted to let all of you know that Canadians are hoping with all their hearts for you. Wish we could help more. Election 08 is THE news story here, too. We sure have missed you.

Awesome. Yeah, it brought me to tears - I'm not ashamed of that. Since when is empathy and compassion a bad thing? Since when is wanting your country back, wanting your country to go in the right direction, wanting to be proud of your country again a bad thing?

The neocons can suck on it - we got it, baby!!!!!

I swear that is the best and most touching thing I have seen on this blog and frankly, throughout this entire campaign. Thank you Elvis Dingeldein. Thank you.

Charles represents the sum of our dreams and our fears, and the journey we have been on as a nation. While we wait to see where this transformational moment in history takes, it is wonderful to know those who have come before, and to see what it means to them to have survived until this dream could be realized.

He is the manifestation of the hope Obama has brought to this nation.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Elvis, for posting that.

DP...I teared up at that, but your comment brought the tears down. I have been stalling all day on writing a piece about my dad for my blog. It probably won't get posted before midnight, but I'm going to write it, and share it with everyone here.

QT

@ CanaDiana - it's great to know that you and your fellow Canadians have our collective backs. I know I appreciate hearing that you're all rooting for us! Thank you!

And thank you, as always, Elvis - between you, Bob and Jumpypants I can't pick a fav. I love you all equally!

I was born in Monterey, CA, and spent my youth traveling NATO territories in the nomadic tribe that was the United States Army during the Cold War's frigid '70s and '80s, but for the most part my hometown was Hattiesburg, MS. Both my parents were from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and so I had grandparents and aunts and uncles there, and spent my summers in that blistering Deep South heat while stuffing myself with the Burger King and McDonald's that was unavailable to me in Europe. When I saw my first Toys R Us, I collapsed and wept like Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson the first time he sees bread and toilet paper in such American superabundance.

But those years in Hattiesburg informed the adult I would someday become in ways it never did the wide-eyed child. My grandparents -- being of a certain social class, with three busy daughters and income enough to afford the luxury -- always had a "Black Mammy" in the house, and for more than 30 years that person was Ms. Lillian King, but we just called her Lil. She was our cook, our maid, our warden, our beat cop, our medic, and my grandparents took very good care of her. They helped her buy her own house in her waning years, and delivered food and medicine and good cheer to her doorstep with undying devotion. Even years after she no longer worked for my family, we brought her to The House for Easter egg hunts and Fourth of July fireworks, and she always found presents under our family Christmas tree. But the one thing Lil would never do and had never done in her life was sit at our table and eat a meal with us. Even in her dotage, her many years of service to my family decades behind her, she took her plate to the small kitchen table, and ate alone as we celebrated Thanksgiving or Christmas with a feast more bountiful than we had any right to enjoy.

I was 16 the first time I thought to ask about this, and was surprised by the answer: It wasn't my family that imposed this Balkanization but Lil herself. A black woman born at the turn of the century in the Deep South simply did not do such a thing as share a table with the white folk she worked for, and that was that. I, of course, thought this patently ridiculous, and said so. My grandmother -- always the soul of discretion, of tight-lipped Southern tact -- told me to hush up; I wouldn't let it go. I left the big dining room, where I had been seated at The Kids' Table (a folding cardtable draped in Thanksgiving finery) because our family had by now outgrown the massive oaken slab that was our formal dining place, marched into the kitchen, and took Lil's plate from the kitchen table. "We'd like you to eat with us today," I said, and held out my hand to her. "We have an extra chair at the kid's table."

I can't begin to explain the mix of emotions I saw in her face that Thanksgiving afternoon. Embarrassment, joy, shame, trepidation, wonder, shock, I really don't know and can't assume to guess. But she followed me into the big dining room, and took her seat with me and my young cousins, and we laughed and ate and had a wonderful meal, and I felt like something had changed. That some unspoken barrier had come down, that some small justice had been done. And whatever pride I might have felt at being the one that led Lil into the big dining room that day was tempered, even at so clueless an age, by an abiding shame that so many years had passed with Lil in the kitchen.

I said it in "Forever" and I'll say it again: None of this has anything to do with why I'm voting for Barack Obama. But it is absolutely why I would not vote for John McCain or Sarah Palin, who think it just and fair to bark about a Real America that cannot tolerate a black man at their table. We are all individual tales of the American Story, every one of us. It's how we learn from the lessons of those tales that makes us worthy of the country that bore us.

Elvis, you've made me cry twice today. Thank you for posting that wonderful video of Mr. Alexander, and for your personal post. It's a reminder of what we're all here for.

Shit, Elvis - you made me cry AGAIN!

I can't even put into words how your story moved me.

Goddamn it, Elvis.
My respect for you grows more every day.

This is why I want to marry you Elvis.

Beautiful video and story. Just beautiful.

I feel like we are right at that moment when something enormous and wonderful is about to happen. The kind of moment that takes your breath away and leaves you crying uncontrolable tears of joy.

"I feel like we are right at that moment when something enormous and wonderful is about to happen. The kind of moment that takes your breath away and leaves you crying uncontrolable tears of joy."

I could not have said it any better.

I liked that old fellow in the video: I have a lot of regard for people who lived through the Depression. My father used to tell me about the time he was a kid working in the fields and one day FDR drove by in a big open car and waved at him, flashing his trademark jaunty smile. My father never forgot that image, and I've never forgotten his stories about what it was like growing up in those times. The speaker in the video has no doubt been through enough to see hateful, desperate bullshit for exactly what it is.

The older I get, the more exasperated I become at seeing the same anachronistic garbage recycled campaign after campaign. There's always a new generation to peddle this trash to, and the Republican hallmark seems to be using ideas without the slightest regard for the rethinking and adaptation called for by whole centuries of history. Which accounts for the current carnivalesque spectacle in which we have a Republican administration quasi-nationalizing whole sectors of the economy even as their presidential candidate touts tired old truisms about the wonders of the free market and accuses his opponent of "socialism." Thank god we don't appear to be buying it this time around.

Obama's victory, if indeed it comes to pass, will be a significant moment in American history--not an end but another one of our necessary beginnings. And not a moment too soon, either—Bush has set a number of precedents that are like to sink us as a republic, and we need a sane adult at the helm now, one who understands what Lincoln did: self-government is a "proposition," an actualized put-case, an experiment. And experiments can always fail, proving the assumptions we took into them wrong and our hopes unfounded.

Charles Alexander said that Barack Obama is "The same in person as he is on TV." This says it all, for me. We can't resist mythologizing our political figures. This is the first time in my life that the man has matched the myth.

(I ready Jumpy Pants' post after writing this!)