The soul of America

 

                                It is no longer the same, as it seems. It's a big change.

                    Elika Takimoto.

Kamala Devi Harris, "the lotus flower that blooms”(1), a lawyer and senator from California, was elected to the senate at the same time that Trump arrived at the White House in 2016. Thanks to the influence of her parents, she was involved in political activism from an early age; with them she learned about the civil rights movement "surrounded by adults who were committed to service and community involvement." The achievement of the United States' vice presidency, the country's second most important post, means for the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother once again her first time of many. On January 20th., Joe Biden will take the oath on the Capitol steps as the new president of the powerful American nation, and at the same time, the voice of a black woman from the top of that podium will echo around the world for the first time. She occupied spaces that were always previously reserved for men and whites, for exemple when she was a prosecutor in the city of San Francisco at the age of 40; here also the first time that a woman and a non-white person held this prosecutor’s position. Later when she became California's attorney general, she was again a pioneer.

The great wave of participation in the presidential elections of 2020 had a noticeable and significant impulse of young people and women, managing, in this way, to eject from the chair of the White House the populist and aggressive businessman, who also led to the reputation of racist and xenophobic and even of being sympathetic to extremist and illegal movements like the Ku Klux Klan. Film director Spike Lee has already linked the image of the president to the far-right movement in a movie script. His famous phrases like “America first” and “Make America Great Again” appear in many lines of KKK members". The election with the largest number of voters and the highest number of votes for a presidential ticket in the country avoided, for the first time in 30 years, the reelection of a president, and led a woman, for the first time, to the position of USA vice-president. Symbols that must be taken into account as a rejection of the proposed model by defeated Trump and a certain “democratic” message to the rest of the world, mainly to peripheral nations with similar extremist political models.

Kamala's Indian ancestry was remembered in Thulasendrapuram, a city south of Chennai, where flowers and requests were deposited in Hindu temples for the gods to help her to emerge victorious, which it seems the gods promptly attended to. 

In her words, the strength of diversity and the desire to build something better in America than what has been done so far: "This election is about so much more than Joe Biden or me. It's about the soul of America and our willingness to fight for it. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Let's get started", said Kamala. 

Antonio C. R. Tupinambá

Fortaleza, November, 7th., 2020.

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1) Kamala means the lotus flower that blooms. the lotus is a sacred flower for the Hindu culture. It is also one of the names of the goddess laksmi. In Sanskrit Kamala means lotus.