Masterpiece: A Change Is Gonna Come

[Today: History in the making...]

Yesterday started out with the kind of joviality – strangers smiling at me in the street, good cheer in the air – that usually foreshadows a bad dream unfolding. So imagine my surprise when I entered my bank at 9:15 in the morning to deposit my paycheck and caught a wisp of a tune in the air. I couldn’t believe it was actually Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ until a middle-aged black man who had just completed his transaction stepped away from the teller window and started singing, full-throat:

It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come
Oh, yes it will…

This was the point when I expected to be struck by a lightning bolt, look down and realize I wasn’t wearing pants, or at least wake from the dream that an African-American was on the verge of winning the White House.

The transient nature of life means that very few days are ‘historic’. It’s a term that gets thrown around a lot, but true history is something that one is lucky to experience a handful of times in the course of a lifetime. Yesterday was one of those days. Barack Obama was elected to be the 44th President of the United States by an overwhelming majority of Americans, turning a page on many of the ugliest aspects of this country’s history. It’s hard not to shake my head in wonder at a country that has the capacity to re-invent itself so drastically, while answering the clarion calls of liberty and equality. In spite of so much evidence to the contrary, our democracy is alive and well.

It’s been a long, long time coming, but a change has finally come.

Listen: A Change Is Gonna Come

Tags: A Change Is Gonna Come, Sam Cooke