My chill factor in good morning, America!

“And so it came to pass that on Nov. 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended, as a black man—Barack Hussein Obama—won enough electoral votes to become president of the United States.” Thus, began Thomas L. Friedman’s post-US Election column in the New York Times.

Great sentiment, but when I joined my San Vicente class the other day and announced my delight over Obama’s election, one of my local students blurted out: “the black Nigger?” I was stunned. It was a knee-jerk response of a child echoing something he learned from his home and culture.

The stun was actually a chill down the spine. Listening to Obama give his Chicago Grant Park speech, deep within the euphoria of the moment, a chill ran down my spine when he got to the part about what’s ahead. He said,“The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America—I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you—we as a people will get there.” He echoed MLK, Jr.’s thoughts in Memphis before a cold-blooded trajectory pierced his cheek and lodged a fatal metal in his spine.

Obama alluded to Lincoln later when he added: “Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that have poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House—a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity.” Short of 10 days 103 years before MLK, Jr. went down, John Wilkes Booth terminated Honest Abe at the Ford theatre in Washington, D.C.

The chill had gotten terrifyingly familiar. Forty-five years ago, in another November month in a small town radio station in Tuguegarao, Cagayan, in the Philippines, I had to read the news item from the wire service about the young American President who had become my hero gunned down in downtown Dallas, Texas. In my late teens as a budding student broadcast journalist, I would first feel the pangs of despair and terror that would occupy a niche in my soul.

Five years later in ’68, I would attend Southern Methodist University in the rich section of Highland Park in Dallas. There I spent my first semester picketing the laundry mat a few buildings behind the Hilton on Central Expressway that boldly displayed the sign, “for whites only.” I also learned to avoid walking down fraternity row where it was a badge of honor to be a member of John Birch Society, headquartered a couple of blocks from my school dorm.

The second thing I did was to register my protest against the war in Vietnam, joining a noon prayer vigil by the University flagpole almost everyday with my New Testament professor. I joined an MLK, Jr.-led March to Arlington Cemetery, Virginia, in a cold February morning against the war in Vietnam, and heard the 39-year-old Baptist Pastor explain how the war was siphoning the assets of the war on poverty, while indiscriminately committing homicide on countless lives of people we callously referred to as “gooks” at the New York Ave. Presbyterian Church. Young and symbiotically basking in the awesome presence of contemporary prophets in the March, I returned to Dallas only to have the chill run down my spine once more.

Two Filipino sailors from a neighboring Naval Air Station Base outside Dallas dropped by my SMU dorm early April and when it became obvious that they downed enough malt whiskey to impair their driving ability, I offered to drive them back to their Base in their sports car. Shortly after getting out of town, the owner of the car realized that I was not covered by insurance. I let him take the steering wheel, an almost fatal mistake.

Going 65 mph, we rear-ended a stopped car at a stoplight down a hill that the driver failed to see while he was busy conversing with his partner in the front passenger seat. My last utterance when I realized what was about to happen was, “Boy, what a way to go.”

In the back seat, I regained consciousness 30 minutes later to the sound of sirens and the smell of gasoline. Quietly crawling out to a public phone by the roadside, I called my roommate who came to picked me up without haste. Adrenaline-drained, I had to be wheeled stiff and frozen to the University dispensary where I was treated for a couple of days. My girlfriend in school in Greensboro, N.C., in tears phoned and reported on her city aflame and the assassination of Dr. King, then being shown on TV. It was then that my attending nurse, otherwise pleasantly rotund and gay, Texas twanged-out:“Thank God, they finally got the Nigger!” With clenched fist, I decided that it was strategically smart to clench my teeth and shut my mouth, as well. I was in her medical care, and I was not about to jeopardize my health in my condition.

A month later, having supported Eugene McCarthy’s lonely vigil against LBJ and HHH in the White House, a classmate and I on our way to our summer jobs in the Northeast watched the California Primary returns on TV at a hotel on 43rd St. in New York City. Conceding way after midnight that, perhaps, RFK had a better chance against the current White House residents, we were resigned to support Robert Kennedy, only to be rudely awakened a few hours later by the news of a Palestinian-delivered .22 caliber bullet snuffing the life out of the New York Senator.

There had been other chills since, not the least of which was Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino’s welcome at the Manila International Airport one August ’83 day while I was boarding a domestic flight from Manila to Legaspi City to start a U.S. Peace Corps volunteers training. That night, I was one unhappy Ilocano who drowned his sorrow in the juice of the vine.

Richard Deats of the Reconciliation and Non-Violence Center feared the unspoken but often hinted spectre of an assassination. He prayed: “Let your Light surround and protect Barack Obama, that he continues to inspire us all, especially the young, the marginalized, the cynical, the despairing who have found in him reason to hope and, perhaps for the first time, to work for a world of justice, peace and freedom.” Amen.

My chill factor over Obama’s election may just be what is needed to remind myself of A. J. Bacevich advice in his book, The Limits of Power: “… to imagine that installing a particular individual in the Oval Office will produce decisive action on any of fronts is to succumb to the grandest delusion of all. The quadrennial ritual of electing a president is not an exercise in promoting change … The real aim is to ensure continuity …”

Yes, indeedee! We can pronounce the Jesus messianic word to Jerusalem again: “You wait for the Son of David to deliver you from the Romans. I have good news for you. No one is coming, and I am it.” One among many brothers who followed him, John XXIII, was once quoted as saying: “I often think of things at night and I think to myself that I should tell it to the Pope in the morning, only to wake up and realize that I am the Pope.” Obama dramatically preached that gospel to us once more. We have met our savior. We are it.

But though the task is clear, it will take some time in the doing. One front for me, the changes that need to happen in the CNMI school system will not happen if we wait around for the executive and legislative branches of government to take the initiative. Nor will we have a highly effective teachers’ group and an effectively taught studentry if we do not network and associate ourselves as teachers and powerfully inject our creativity and wisdom into the system.

Herman Greene in North Carolina opines: “The election of Obama opens new possibilities for us all–not that he will do our work, but that we can do ours.” Famed author Alice Walker in her open letter to Obama chimes: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

And I hum “We Shall Overcome” while a young boy in the front row of my class have yet to hear and learn the message.