I stepped onto the crowded bus and quickly took the only
seat available. I was exhausted from the
two days of traveling that I had just undergone. I was traveling back to college in Michigan
from visiting my ill father at home.
Unfortunately, my supposedly reliable sedan had broken down somewhere in
rural Illinois and I was forced to hitchhike to Chicago. With my parents urging, I booked a flight
from Chicago to Michigan, as it would be patently unsafe for me to attempt to
hitchhike the rest of the way.
I was on the bus on my way to the
airport. The woman I was sitting next to
was an older African American woman. She
soon introduced herself to me as Ida. I
noticed that she was wearing an “I voted” pin, and I asked her about her
thoughts on the election, as I was unfamiliar with Illinois politics but had
vaguely heard of a man named Barack Obama running for a senate seat. She proudly informed me that she was a
staunch Democrat, and had voted for Barack Obama, a young African American
constitutional lawyer. She had lived in
Mississippi, married to a sharecropper, but fled with her family when a
relative was almost beaten to death.
She got off at the next stop, and I
knew that I would never see her again. I
was amazed by the course of her life, and pondered how much society would
change over the course of my own. She
had weathered experiences that I could barely dare to imagine, and experienced
so much hate over the course of her life.
I was struck by her resilience, and by the cathartic experience that
voting for Obama must be to her. As I
stared out the bus window at the streets of Chicago, I wondered how many
strangers I passed by everyday who had stories as incredible as hers, and felt
saddened by how many of these stories I would never have the opportunity to
hear.
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