If you'd like to watch/read Obama's Farewell Address, click here.
When I was younger, my family pretended politics didn't exist. I never heard my parents talk about who was in the Oval Office nor what they were doing, so for a long time, I never realized how important the person running this country is. It wasn't until high school that I started to pick up on the salience of politics in every day life, and it was because Obama won.
I still remember the night he won the first time. My mom and my stepdad had been talking about the election for weeks. My stepdad is a staunch Republican while my mother has been a pretty loyal Democrat whenever she makes it out to vote. Needless to say, my mother was nervous for the whole week up to the election. She never had a moment she was sure that he was going to win until the moment it happened. She ran into my room that night and nearly tripped over me where I slept on the floor (I liked sleeping on the floor those days. It was surprisingly comfortable.). When she realized what the lump she had stepped on was, she started jumping and nudging me with her feet, shouting, “He won! Obama won, Maiasia!” It wasn't the worst way to be woken up.
Now, eight years have gone by, and at some point I started taking his presence in the White House for granted. Watching his farewell address, I understood that it was really over and just how much that meant. And you know what? I cried. Not just for myself, but for our Former President and his family. For everyone who had felt like they could make a difference, that Obama could be the difference if we all came together and worked at it. It made me cry because, as the crowd chanted “Four More Years! Four More Years!”, I knew that the next four years would be so much darker that the four that came before them, and I couldn't understand how this country had regressed the way it did. Obama's platform was change, and hope, and believing that one day we could look at our nation and see it had finally become “A more perfect union”. When did we reject those ideals? And, more importantly, how could we?
The charlatan that will take office in a few days does not deserve to bear the title President. Not after such a great man has carried the burden with grace and strength and a healthy sense of humor. In four years, if The Donald makes it to his farewell address without burning to death in a tanning bed like those girls in Final Destination, I'll be happy to see him go. I'll be trying to move on from a very damaging, very disappointing chapter in American history. I'll be thinking about his Predecessor who taught me so much about what I could achieve just by being who he was.
