Shortly after midnight on election evening, television cameras captured the face of Jesse Jackson in tears. He was shown standing among the huge crowd in Grant Park, Chicago, where Barack Obama was giving his first speech as president-elect.
For me, that image expressed the dramatic character of last Tuesday’s events. Here was Reverend Jackson, a hard-bitten veteran of many civil rights struggles, weeping with joy.
As I write this column, our national elections are about to happen and, unless another stalemate takes place, we will know the identity of our new president by the time you read this.
I hope you have had the pleasure of watching election returns with friends sympathetic to your favorite candidates. From experience I know how painful it can be to find yourself, at such a time, among people whose philosophy differs sharply from your own.
Can Catholics vote in good conscience for Barack Obama and Joe Biden? Or will such a vote undermine their standing in the church?
The bishop of Scranton, PA, the city where Biden was born, apparently considers the vote to be a betrayal of Catholic principles.
My neighbor’s father, in town for a visit, impressed me as a man of some authority. His bearing gently suggested a person used to being in charge.
Bob Herder, it turns out, was a pilot who flew planes for several airlines before his retirement a few years ago. Among the companies he worked for was Eastern Airlines, for three decades one of Boston’s major carriers.
By the time of my birth, the twenties had almost ceased their roaring. The great crash would hit the next year, 1929, when I was only one year old.
Of course, I can remember neither era, times that provided some of the most dramatic changes in our nation’s history.
But on Monday, September 29th, I felt something like what Americans must have felt when the Great Depression began. Bankers and stock brokers were not jumping out of Wall Street windows, but a strange unfamiliar tension had gripped the nation.
Gene Cohen likes to tell a story about his parents-in-law, Howard and Gisele Miller, when the couple came to visit Gene and his wife Wendy in Washington, D. C.
One day, they decided to tour the National Gallery of Art. After leaving the museum, they took the subway toward their dinner destination, the home of their daughter and Gene.
Date: Monday, September 29, 2008.
Trip: New York City to Cambridge, MA
Distance: approximately 200 miles
Time: some four hours on the road.
Left streets of Manhattan at 11 AM, assuming passage of the bailout bill by the House of Representatives in Washington. At our departure, the stock market stands at 10,900, down from Friday’s close of 11,143.13.