One Nation Under a Groove
BY DEBORAH RUDACILLE
Two years ago, my daughter Amelia and I drove to Northern Virginia during the Christmas holidays to pick up her boyfriend at Dulles Airport. Getting to the airport was easy, but I missed the exit on the way out and the three of us wound up, as Baltimoreans so often do, lost in D.C.
The experience wasn’t as miserable as it usually is, however, partly because the city was lit up all bright and pretty for Christmas, but also because we happened to be listening to Parliament Funkadelic, “One Nation Under a Groove.”
We joked that the CD would be the perfect soundtrack for a funk tour of Washington D.C.–and God knows in December 2006, we all could have used such a tour to drive out the anti-funk that had settled on the Capital like a croaking pterodactyl.
Who knew that barely two years later the music could easily serve as the soundtrack for what feels like a giant national love-in?
“Ready or not here we come/gettin down on the one which/we believe in/one nation and we’re on the move/nothin can stop us now”
Over the past year, I’ve been hearing those lyrics echo in my head as I canvassed for Barack Obama in Pennsylvania during the primaries and in Virginia in the run up to the general election.
I heard them on a summer day so hot that my fellow canvasser and I probably won a few sympathy votes from Republicans (or at least Independents) as we trudged up and down the sweltering streets, knocking on doors and checking off names as we tried to talk Virginia blue.
I heard them on a frigid day last February at the Baltimore Convention Center as I emptied out my pockets to go through the metal detector and a young woman ahead of me in line said, “this crowd is a lot more diverse than I thought it would be.”
I heard them especially loudly the night before the election as I stood among 90,000 people at at a cold damp fairgrounds outside Manassas and dared for the first time to believe that we really might win.
We meaning not just our candidate, the man who had brought all those folks out “on a school night” as he observed, but WE meaning WE THE PEOPLE of every conceivable age, ethnicity, class, color there assembled, including that stray Frenchman with the bandaged hand.
And for each of who had stood all day in the chill watching the fairgrounds fill up, all those other people throughout the country (and around the world) who had dared to hope that the promise of America, the words we recited by rote in the pledge of allegiance, “with liberty and justice for all,”–a dream so long cherished and so often betrayed–were not a lie so much as a promise about to be fulfilled.
The inauguration of Barack Obama will not erase Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib any more than it will blot out the slave market on the city dock in Annapolis, or the Trail of Tears or the Ludlow Massacre or My Lai or any of the other stains on our honor as a people.
But when the votes were counted on November 4th, the promise of an America in which ALL people are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, finally became something more than words.
I can only imagine what this day means to African-American people. But I know what it means to me. It means that I can keep on believing in America, and keep trying to make the dream of America come true for myself and others. It means that the ideals on which the nation was founded are not dead, nor were they ever a mere con, a cynical cover for greed and exploitation. It means that brotherhood (and sisterhood) is more than a utopian dream.
It means that we are now, at least for today, One Nation.
Happy Inauguration Day!