Pavlov's Hot Dog

When people from my generation (baby boomers) tell you they didn't think they'd see a black president within their lifetime, they're usually realists about how slow change can be. Or maybe they understand how complex it is — just like changes in our health behaviors. We don't change until we're ready, and when you're talking about a nation, you're not quite sure when there are enough of us who are ready.

So I find it particularly ironic that it was exactly 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, that 84,000 people crowded a stadium to attest to their more-than-readiness for change from a man who could have been any color but just happened to be black.  People want a change from the failed Republican policies of the last eight years and the visionary person who they believe can deliver it is a man named Barack Obama who by the way happens to be black. He could be purple for all anyone cared, as long as he can help bring about change.

To the young people who grew up relatively color blind due to the hard-won school integration changes of the civil rights era, Barack is simply the guy who "gets it." He happens to be black.

This is an astounding and welcome change of attitude to many of my generation. When I was young, the repugnant and insulting question asked of both women and black men as leaders would have been whether they had the intelligence to rule (and in the case of women, in particular, the emotional strength.) I kid you not. How far we've come when the black candidate is accused of being TOO cerebral, too academic.

How far we've come when a female candidate and a black candidate really slug it out, both proving themselves to be warriors for the cause they believe in. I didn't mind the fight one bit. To me it just said how much they both cared about bringing change to America. And maybe it's the desperateness for change from the last eight years of unfettered Republican rule that ironically set up Americans to not really question race or sex in choosing presidential candidates. It's a good sign that the millions of young voters who turned out for the primary are probably wondering what's the big deal?

And yet for those of us who lived in the era of the civil rights struggle, the change is visceral. I was a senior in an all white MN high school when King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. My French Club had raised funds to take a trip to New Orleans to visit the French Quarter and ostensibly speak some French, departing St. Paul, MN, by train within a few days of King's death. Changing train stations in Chicago we rode a yellow school bus that was surrounded by helmeted baton-carrying National Guardsmen and rioters in the streets of Chicago. A bus of oh-so-clueless-oh-so-white kids. Then began the long 20-hour slog to New Orleans on the legendary City of New Orleans train, our hearts breaking for the heart-broken black porters so much that you didn't have the heart to even ask them to sell you a sandwich. Everything felt hopeless. Memphis, the scene of King's assassination, was burning, so the train didn't stop. It rolled slowly through, and I will never forget the sight.

When I entered college the next autumn, my freshman class had ninety black students, up from two the previous year. Shocking circumstances had prompted change, as they so often do. The seeds were sown. And lo and behold, on August 28, 2008, they were reaped. Who knew that that would be the day we felt the change profoundly?

ABC news interviewed a black woman who had seats in the nosebleed section of Mile HIgh Stadium. She spoke eloquently of looking down on Obama and feeling she was looking down from the mountain King spoke of in his last speech before his death. If you have any doubt of the magnitude of the changes of the past forty-five years, read that speech again.

Diets don't work, the health behavior change experts keep telling us, because they are too drastic. Instead we're supposed to make gradual changes that become second nature to us—-habits we hardly think about. School integration and affirmative action programs helped us slowly change our schooling, hiring and employment habits to be more inclusive of minorities (and women) in our day-to-day living. Were they working? There's still far to go, but Barack Obama's nomination and Hillary's historic good run at it are indicators of how much our attitudes have changed. Change has arrived. Followed, of course, by the need to keep changing.

My wise grandmother told me that the only thing we could count on was change. (She also told us, as we sat on the couch and watched it with her in 1969, that the first manned moon landing was a fake-—completely staged. But I'll give her a pass on that.) I try to embrace change. Or at least I hope I do. When my choice of presidential candidates from either party was not to my suiting, I wrote in Alan Greenspan's name, as I considered him the most potent agent of change in our nation.

Peaceful change every four years is one of the very foundations of our government. The founding fathers passionately believed in the need to regularly shake up the power bases lest they become too entrenched. Yet here we sit mired in partisan politics that make us believe we are meant to act as if we were die-hard loyal fans of our sentimental-favorite sports team, rather than informed voters who weigh the pros and cons of supporting a candidate to lead us for the next four-year term. We are stuck, stuck, stuck in our partisan habits, no matter how much we suffer at the hands of our own party, and no matter how much they flip-flop their policies so that you can't really tell what they stand for. Yet we remain slow-moving elephants and stubborn donkeys. Polls show only a slight margin in the middle that is willing to change its mind, and that group essentially controls the election.

If you are one of those people who is able to adapt your thinking, I would urge you to look outward at our rapidly-changing world and ask who can best help America regain its edge. Vote for the person who can bring us back from the brink, not for the next prom king or guy you'd most like to have a beer with. If you really can't decide, consider that roughly half of the U.S. has had to suffer through the destruction of the American dream by an administration they did not elect. If you voted for the Republicans and feel they didn't live up to their promises or reputation, you might want to make it up to the other half of America by going with change for change's sake and voting in the other direction. If you're not happy with the results, our marvelous Constitution gives you the opportunity to express your change of mind four years from now. Now if only we could change our ingrained eating and exercise habits by simply going to the polls and flipping a lever.