Obama in Little Havana

Today was a great day for south florida. In the face of protests and plenty of percieved opposition, barack obama had the "audacity of hope" to come and address our community with his crusade of change. And boy was it appreicated. In a packed house at the Miami dade county auditorium, barack inspired us all with his ideals and broad ability to unify those around him. The diversity of the crowd present was a testament to that.

On a personal note, I arrived at 1:45pm to find a long line of eager supporters waiting to enter the auditorium. Meanwhile, across the street from them was a crowd of hard-line Cuban conservatives yelling atrocities in Spanish (mainly) via a well amplified bullhorn. I had made arrangements to meet with a group of supporters who wanted to counter this expected opposition for media purposes. I even made a sign of my own.

Regardless, we were somewhat unprepared to go up againt this experienced opposition (45 years and counting). This prompted some tense moments. Coming up with good chants to energize us was a challenge, but overall we accomplished our goal and drew a good amount of the media attention. The main organizer,a harvard student named giancarlo, held the spotlight.

Once inside, though, the spirit was completely different. People were assembling in their seats and in the process of finding one for myself, I got plenty of photo ops due to my sign, LOL. I guess I'm meagerly creative after all. Anyway, i had a good feeling about the whole thing. I finally found a seat beside an interesting black woman named wanda. She had a calm and collected demeener about her, although her bleached blond hair screamed "statement". We made small talk, about how she was from Baltimore and curious about obama. I have been very impressed lately about how politically engaged people from the north east are. So much as to spend $30-$100 to see a candidate speak that you might not even vote for? That's somewhat of an investment in government, I would say. The community I was raised in never really taught me that value. I guess they were more cynical about government than I thought. The feeling was that we don't and can't make a difference... THAT NEEDS TO CHANGE!

Just before barack began to speak, my friend Mariah joined us. I was worried that she would miss him. She did miss the parade of local leaders talking about themselves which was ok. It was a little forced fed, but I can see the need to leverage a big name to help grow the base. Once obama spoke though, the crowd went wild. The experience was surreal for me...after following his movement for over a year, reading his book and absorbing just about anything the national media would put out about him, it was awesome to see his reality. I won't get into his speech since I'm sure it in youtube but his way of interacting with the crowd was flawless. Every shout out was adressed I detail, somewhat of a challenge given the formal speech he was proly following. It gave you a great sense that his words weren't reherssed at all and were coming straight from his core beliefs. Yet another piece of evidence that he is the "realist" candidate I've ever been aware of.

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