I’m here because of Ashley

For me the most memorable moment of Barack’s most moving speech of the campaign, given last week at the Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, was when he talked about a roundtable discussion in S. Carolina:

There is a young, 23-year-old white woman named Ashley Baia who organizes for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She’s been working to organize a mostly African American community since the beginning of this campaign, and the other day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

So Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we begin. It is why the walls in that room began to crack and shake.

And if they can shake in that room, they can shake in Atlanta.

And if they can shake in Atlanta, they can shake in Georgia.

And if they can shake in Georgia, they can shake all across America. And if enough of our voices join together; we can bring those walls tumbling down. The walls of Jericho can finally come tumbling down. That is our hope – but only if we pray together, and work together, and march together.

I thought of this speech twice this weekend. Yesterday, halfway through my shift for 100,000 Calls for Obama (getting a lot of wrong numbers and answering machines), a grad student walked in, holding in his hand the blue flyer that I had posted on Rains doors two days before. He doesn’t live there, but his girlfriend does, and so he came out to join the cause. For the record, his name is Kenny, and he’s an immunology grad student.

Then today, I was supposed to go on a bike ride/hike with Rachelle, but the weather forecast didn’t look good so she suggested planting trees up at the dish. So we did. I planted the first tree of my life (a Douglass oak hybrid), right by a big rock near the dish. If anyone had asked why I was there, I would have had to say, “I’m here because of Rachelle.” While we were digging berms for the trees, a lady with a Russian accent walked by and asked if there would be more tree planting opportunities in the future. She made note of the email address and said she would be back sometime.

Social movements are about connections between people. Great leaders inspire those kinds of positive connections to occur. I think that is what makes Barack so special—that he ignites an energy in us that we didn’t know was there before. One tree won’t save the planet. But it’s a start.