When They Drove Old Dixie Down

   They should have played “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” when Barak Obama was elected president of the United States.

   It’s a song about a defining moment in the Civil War that saw the old South and all that it stood for going down to defeat.

   They should have put the version by Joan Baez on a public address system and let it play over the massive audience in Grant Park like a marching song of freedom rising through the chilly night.

   Everyone there and everyone in their homes and everyone all over the world should have joined in singing it. “The night they drove old Dixie down, and the bells were ringing…”

   Its intention would not have been to reject the South of today but to acknowledge that the Dixie of slavery, segregation and hatred had been rejected in a new and enshrining moment of American democracy.

   A black man had been elected president of the United States.

   I said hatred had been rejected, not ended. Our new president is as much a symbol as a reality. He represents equality and fairness. But even those who had been his loudest supporters can’t say that the rise of this intelligent, articulate man means that the nation has at last cleansed itself of ignorance and bigotry.

   It’s still out there, folks. I bring you an e-mail sent by a woman with whom I have communicated for years who seems to have suddenly lost her mind. Call her Esther. I wouldn’t distinguish her by using her real name.

   She wrote: “Make sure your guns are loaded because the blacks, oh excuse, African Americans, are going to be blasting through our front door…”

   She wrote: “I won’t ever distinguish him [Obama] by calling him president. He is going to turn our U.S.A. into a Communist nation, and the Muslims will rule. They will shoot every Christian on sight…”

   She wrote: “Now we are in for it. We keep a shotgun by our front door, leaning in a corner. We each have a loaded hand gun in our headboards…”

   The existence of our Esthers sends chills through me, but they do nothing to dampen the glory of what this nation has accomplished, overcoming Esther to emerge as good and decent people.

   Other e-mailers and telephone callers celebrated the election. One wrote, “I’m so proud to be an American, I can’t describe it. Proud in a way I never thought possible two years ago.”

   “What a night,” a friend shouted, “what a time!” Newspapers sold hundreds of thousands of extra copies to those who sought a piece of history to take home and keep as a souvenir of Tuesday’s triumph; as proof of change.

   Obama’s rise tells the world we have rejected the notion that the past is prelude to the future. We have overcome our past to create a new future, and now it’s time to dance in the streets. It’s time to sing. You know the tune: “The night they drove old Dixie down, and the people were singin’…”—about Obama, about the future and about a new place for America in this old and scary world.