One profoundly thrilling part of voting last weekend was the feeling of how far we've come.
I grew up in the South during Jim Crow days. I took segregation for granted until I was 19 or 20, and then the admirably bold civil rights movement brought it to my attention. To my lasting shame, I had never even questioned the obvious and brutal unfairness to "colored people."
But Saturday I got to vote for a black man for president. That man doesn't use race as part of his campaign. But I can't help being proud that my country has come so far.
The reminders of the more racist past are ever close. Note in the picture the Confederate soldier with the American flag at the Chatham County courthouse in the rather liberal and educated town of Pittsboro where I cast my vote. Mostly we don't even see such symbols because we're used to them. It's so easy to not see things.
I devotedly love the South, North Carolina, and the town I grew up in--even though very bad things have been done here. I'm old enough now to have taken some interest in genealogy; I've recently learned that at least one of my direct forebears owned slaves and one of my forefathers was a young doctor who died at the Battle of Second Manassas. I take some pride in the fact that they were prominent citizens of their time and place; I'm not proud--can barely take in--the fact that some of my relatives "owned" people, with all the horrors that entailed. I wonder if there's any possibility that, like me, they didn't see. (Not that that excuses anything.)
At any rate, you can see what I carried with me to vote this time. I wish Ethel Gilchrist, the black woman who was my third parent, had lived to vote this year. I'm glad that I have.
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