It is difficult for me to adequately express the way I feel tonight. It is, of course, a monumental occasion for the United States. But, I don’t know if there is a clear way to express what it means to me as an individual. So, I will share something that wasn’t really meant for this location — I wrote this to my sister.
I started this life like most people do, as a baby. I think that was my first mistake. How do you really excel in any way when you are chained to mundanity? If I could have sprung into this world at the age of 10 I think it would have been better, for me at least.
I was a born at a time when babies like us weren’t in style. Certainly I was not the first of my kind. There is a long history of brown babies in the Americas. My own sister, you, pre-dated me by more than a decade; Tomas Jefferson had a child like us. But, culturally people like me, and you don’t exist; we all have improbable stories. Stories that have no real reason to exist, except, that no one wanted to admit that we existed. “We,” no one wanted to admit that multi-racial was possible. As if we were mules. Something that came and went in a single life: not an ostracized group that came and intermingled and passed and re-mingled again.
That silly assumption that I must be adopted, because my family was a different color 50% of the time. In part I am very invested into story. Because that is what my life is, a story. Not a memoir. My life is a story, like parents tell their children, a fable. We are the descendants of a man who spun a tale to support the life he wanted. He was given this freedom because his father did the same. I have been told the story of our past by our dad; by my mother; by our grandfather; I have no reason to believe any of them. I have no reason to trust any of them. I have heard our uncle’s version of the story too, it is just a lie that covers a family secret one step deeper than the family secret everyone knows.
I want to extend my congratulations to everyone that has taken the time to express there opinion today. Ultimately it doesn’t matter who people feel will make the best decision for the United States, only that people make a decision. I would rather survive through things that I disagree with than listen to people that didn’t invest anything complain about how the world turned out in their absense.
For the next four years we will live in a very different place than in the last eight. We each get to decide whether we are going to invest in a more prosperous United States or combat it. I hope that you make the most of our future.
Good Night and Good Luck
