The audacity of hope

I have been a big fan of president-elect Barack Hussein Obama from the beginning. I read his two books. I think reading dreams from my fathers was life changing. The truth is that i never thought that i would live to see a black president. It is hard for me to put into words what his victory represents for me.


I have spent my whole life talking about people needing to follow their dreams and living their destiny. As of me, i have always known that i was born to be succesful and impact others. However, what amazed me about barack obama story is his audacity. You know they are dreams and they are dreams. How can a " skinny kid with a funny name" dream to be the president of the united states? I mean maybe some of us have thought about it vaguely before but it's one thing to think in your head and it is another to say it out loud. I am amazed. I wonder how that conversation went when he told his wife. I mean if my husband ( lets say for argument sake he was a senator)came to me and said that he wanted to run for president, i would laugh. I would tell him: " honey i believe in you but this country is not ready for a black president, so please lets save time, energy and shame; just forget about it. Trust me, i know what i 'm talking about"





How many of us have heard that kind of argument for an idea or a dream we have had. I know i have heard it many times from others. The truth is that it is not so much what others are saying about our ideas that hurt , it is the fact that what they are saying is a reflection of our own fears. Sometimes i don't even say my dreams out loud because i have killed them all by myself. At this point, i do not even let myself dream anymore. This takes me back to my question, how did this " skinny kid with a funny name" manage to dream that kind of dream. I mean wanting to be the president of the united states of America. Let's just look at it logically. His father is a foreigner from kenya ( we all know how people view Africa) , his mother is a "regular person". He is not extremely crazily rich, he is young with not much experience and yeah he is black. May i say that the odds were against him. But still he had the audacity of hoping, of dreaming that he of all people could maybe become the president of the united states of America.





Barack Obama story makes me question all the excuses i have used not to follow my dreams. I have so many of them. When i was single i used to say that i wanted to be married first so that my success would not come in the way of finding true love. Now that i am married i say that having a child makes it a bit difficult to follow my dreams. Yet the truth is that i am scared of failure or better yet maybe i am scared of success. Barack obama has put me to shame and has taken away all my fears. I now want to go back to dreaming like when i was a child. I want to go back to believing that i could be a senator. I want to go back to believing that maybe i can be a lawyer. I want to go back to believing that i do not have to be one specific thing , that i can ecxell in many different arena. That truly the sky is the limit. I wan to affect and help change the lives of women, the weak and the children. I want to believe that one day my name would be recorded in the history books. God knows i used to dream as a child, i truly believed that i could do anything with God help.


So when i heard that Barack Obama won, i cried. I cried for all the black americans that have struggled in this country. I cried for all the whites that made this possible, that look beyond race and that said we can not take back what we did in the past but we can start making things right now. I cried for my african continent that all of the sudden became something hot. I cried for all the broken dreams i have ever had. I cried like i knew Barack Obama personally.