by Jim Jividen

Created on: February 27, 2009

It felt good to vote for Obama Tuesday. My absentee ballot never arrived (which required some explanation at the elementary school where I voted at 7:30 in the AM- also requiring explanation was why they had me listed at two different polling places in their records, meaning my days of voting multiple times for Democrats have apparently ended) so, for the first time since 2000, I actually went to the polls.

We neither had punch cards nor electronic ballot; I actually drew a line from Obama's name to the office of President of the United States.

And it felt good.

This embarrasses me.

It embarrasses me because I don't want to claim any element of the "we shall overcome" vibe that accompanied Obama's election. I'm a white guy and have never faced racial discrimination; I don't deserve any portion of the reflected glory in having an African-American elected President. I'm a good lefty, albeit not as sleeve wearing as was I two decades ago. It's funny, one of the reasons I became an educator was because I like the sharing of ideas, but despite all the prattle about lefty leaning college professors, every pressure at my job goes to minimizing the chances that anything which slides from my mouth offends anyone. It's the nature of living on the margins of corporate America, a slip up and I have no health insurance, if I bruise too many feelings I can't pay my mortgage.

Sure, if you're going to be a professor, it's good to profess something, but one does what one needs to do.

But as a kid, in the heart of the Reagan 80s in rural Ohio, I grew very accustomed to being a minority of one on a whole host of progressive issues, both racial and otherwise. Affirmative action, economic inequality, gender equity, the rights of the accused, gay and lesbian discrimination, the job of the media to tell truth to power - If I stood alone once, I stood alone a thousand times, in high school, in undergraduate school, even in law school in the early 90s (in '87 16 year old Jividen gave a speech to the Lions Club in Marion, Ohio on the sociological importance of the 40th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's breaking the color barrier - my thesis was that 4 decades after Robinson, 3 after Brown v. Bd of Ed, two after I Have a Dream, and one after the Commodores recorded "Brickhouse" the economic metrics suggested that blacks in the US seemed to be sliding further away from the top of the mountain and I wondered why that was - you have never seen a dude lose an audience more quickly than 16 year

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