Why I can't resist having hope

Until now, I've resisted putting much personal information into this blog.

I'm not sure why, perhaps I wanted to maintain an impartial distance. Now that this distance is clearly out the window, I feel like my story, or the story of my family has brought here me to this place in a way that has made my recognition of this new movement and my participation in it inescapable.

My father was Irish, born in Dublin, Ireland. At the age of three, his father went to Burma as an engineer. At this young age, he was evacuated from Burma to escape the advancing Japanese forces, and grew to 10 years old living in Shimla, India. He finished his studies at Trinity College and went to Canada for graduate school as a PhD candidate in Physics in the early sixties. After a brief post-doctoral stint in California, where he met my mother, he went back to Canada and began a career in physics. The year was 1965.

My mother was born in New Caledonia, and came to California at the age of 10. Speaking french as a first language, she felt out of place as a teenager on the west coast in the fifties.

When my parents made the decision to move to Canada in 1965, politics was not a small part of the decision for them. I have read many of the letters my father wrote to my mother during this time, and the Kennedy assassination, the rise of militarism and escalation in Vietnam were subjects that they talked about, and made them like the United States less than their alternative, Canada.

As a child, I really did not understand this. I questioned why they would allow this to influence their decision making, and why they wouldn't choose to live in such a cool place like California.

It wasn't until I came here myself, as a graduate student in Physics at Stanford, that I started to understand.

Despite moving here during the Clinton years, I was struck by how apolitical and apathetic most Americans were. It was as if the thought of change and the hope for responsible government was a myth that existed in ancient times.

I have studied history my entire life, and this movement that I'm witnessing now has not happened in 40 years.

I walk down the street and people are talking about politics, and they're excited about it.

People actually are allowing themselves to believe that something might change and that government might actually speak to them and not the rich or the interest groups.

This is an enormous thing that Barack Obama is doing right now.

It is so earth shaking that the real effects of this will not be realized for 10 or 20 years.

Living in the United States for almost 20 years now, I have never been tempted to give up my Canadian citizenship.

If Barack Obama wins the Presidency, I would consider it.