This Revolution Was Televised

This was a motherfucking revolution. Not a Che walking through the jungles of Bolivar revolution. No Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver standing in black leather jackets and a shotgun "fuck the pigs revolution". This was the revolution that CLR James wrote about in The Black Jacobians or Paulo Friere wrote about in Pedagogy Of The Opressed.

This was a revolution about seizing power. Power to reshape urban school systems; power to cool a planet; power to harness runaway markets; power to reassert an ideal founded in Philadelphia and recast at the reflecting pool by a southern preacher, and power nurtured in a small cell on Robben Island -that there can be no compromise for individual freedom.

Tuesday at noon, revolution beamed down on the face of an illiterate Kenyan woman sitting behind an ex-President. She could not understand the words that were being spoken, but witnessed their meaning on the faces of hundreds of thousands, who came to hear her grandson accept the leavers of power.

Last night I walked down U Street in the nation’s capital and, booming from speakers in a parked car were the speeches of Barack Obama, laid down over hip hop and jazz tracks. Like Bob Marley, Obama’s words of eloquence, poetry and intellect are now seeping into the global consciousness. These words of revolution carried on the digital waves of the Internet will be played in Bodegas in Harlem, at Youth night in Cotton Valley Louisiana, in back alleys in Lagos, on side-walks in Ho-Chi- Minh-City, and on IPods in Amsterdam.

Hope is the material out of which dreams are formed, and then transformed into imagination which fuels revolution. The revolution that began on January 20 is so powerful that a child in Zimbabwe watching a black and white television screen, powered by a generator, imagined himself differently after a black hand reached for a bible on the steps of the Capitol. A young college girl in China looked at the podium on the Capitol and imagined, "I can change my village, my town, my city, my country for the next generation." Revolution comes when regular people imagine themselves to be great.

This was a revolution that will affect every capital and village in the world. We may not see the results in our lifetime, but then we just might. We cannot know because none of us has ever been here before.

Yesterday, Moses did not just ask to "Let my people go," but was appointed to the motherfucking throne.

Gil Scott-Heron was wrong. The revolution was televised on a 42-inch flat screen in HDTV. I know because, like the rest of the world, I saw it with my own eyes.