We Aren't Following This Man

If you know me well, and only a very few do, you know about my tears. The ones I’m talking about are the ones that come when something touches me, moves me. It may be with a whispering feather touch of sentiment or it may be with the power of a storm at sea; these tears are not mine own tears.

Call me weird; after a lifetime I’m used to that.

These words are for you.

We have watched something unfold in the past year or so that this morning has brought the tears.

And so these words are for you.

Together we have seen with our own eyes, felt with our own hearts, and responded with our own spirits, the maturing of a man.

First we stared in disbelief.

Then we smiled.

Then we listened a little.

Then we shook our collective head, as though to clear it.

Then we listened again, and we watched, you and I, while this man stumbled and caught his balance again and again, children in a schoolyard watching a classmate trying something for the first time, at first curious but gradually coming to want to see him succeed.

His struggles have been our own struggles, yours and mine. The obstacles have been our own. His tenacity has been ours, too.

What we have seen, you and I, is that stumbling growing into a stride that we respect. What we have heard is the Voice of a man growing into a Leader. What we have felt is the change in our own selves as we’ve watched and heard the change in him.

By the very act of expending the energy it takes to watch, to listen, we ourselves have contributed to the growth of not just this man but of our own selves and our nation. We are creating a path for him, and for ourselves, as we go along.

So these words are for you.

Something inside of us is responding to what we ourselves have wrought. We don’t have to trust this man, although we can. Why? Because it’s really us finally beginning to trust our own selves, our own guts, and to know … know … not just wonder, not just hope … know … that we together, you and I, are the ones setting the path here, hitting our stride.

And this man knows it too. When words like ‘we’ and ‘us’ and ‘our’ start popping up every which way from Tuesday, the children in the schoolyard and that struggling classmate are no longer children.

You know, there’s this thing about words. It’s not so much what you say but how you say it. What in the mouth of one person is nothing but rhetoric becomes something altogether different when it comes from someone else. Hollow takes on substance. Why? It’s because we know the difference between rhetoric and real. We feel it.

These words are for us. 

We aren’t following this man. 

We’re right beside him, where we belong.