This week marked the opening of The Obama Presidential Center.  Rather than merely a facility to store and view the best and brightest moments of the eight-year Barack Obama presidency, it is very much something else.

Part museum, part community campus, part city park complete with a basketball court and barbecue grilling stations, along with vegetable gardens, walkways, a physical to-scale recreation of the Oval Office, as well as a destination, state-of-the-art, neighborhood gathering place housing numerous educational programs, classes and activities for people of all ages.

No, this is not a plug for the president or First Lady Michelle Obama, or the Center.

Even though the place seems quite impressive and cool to me.

And the former First Couple are, in my opinion, well, let’s just say sorely missed.

Rather it is me urging everyone to take a look at two things:

The first is the ambition of what they are trying to create – something innately and historically American because it is a bit new and ingenious.

As was stated numerous times at its inaugural ceremonies on Friday, the building and grounds is not primarily a gauzy, nostalgic look-back at the Obama years. 

Instead it is an attempt to revitalize the First Lady’s hometown neighborhood on the south side of Chicago (Note: And his adopted one) by providing it with one of the largest, functional and certainly most expensive community centers in the country. 

A place that fosters education, teaches history (note: the successes as well as the failures of the O years), and encourages reflection. 

While at the same time giving the average local or far-away international tourist a fun place to hang out.

An out-of-the-box stab at something different.

That, in itself, serves as a more than apt metaphor and representation of what the Obamas and his presidency meant for the country at the time he was elected.

But as impressive as all of this is, it was the theme and tenor of the former president’s remarks on opening day that really got to me, and got me thinking.

No, I will not be summarizing the speech or breaking it down.  You can watch it yourself here:   

Or better yet read the transcript of what he said here.

Rather it was his reminder to the crowd, and the worldwide audience no-doubt watching, that brings me to my second point.

Which is that despite the insanity currently happening, both in the country and within the now vomitous gold gilded Oval Office (Note: My words, he was far more polite), the 250 year history of the United States has always been a constant back and forth swing between freedom vs. repression, equality vs. racism  and the upper ruling class vs. the “poor.” (Note: I put “poor” in  quotes since 99% plus of us would be considered peons if we use present-day wealth disparities as the measure that determined who really ruled who).

Not to mention a perpetual fight for rights and non-discrimination by the many, and frankly countless, diverse minority groups comprising the essential tapestry fabric that is truly “America.”

What does it mean to be a country whose very founding was based on the tapestry principle (Note: Carole King excepted)?

That despite all of our many faults we are still the only place in the world where you STILL AUTOMATICALLY AND LEGALLY become one of us, i.e. AMERICAN, because you live here.

As a child of immigrant grandparents, who grew up in a neighborhood of immigrants in the most immigrant populous and racially mixed U.S. city in the country during the most progressive decade in U.S. history (Note: NYC in the 1960s. And it didn’t seem so special at the time) I took all the mix and match cultural stuff sort of for granted.

But as an adult the reality of who we also are on the other side of big city inclusion has come crashingly into focus in too many unexpected and frankly, for me, unimaginable ways.

So when Pres. Obama got to the part of his speech were he spoke of the radical nature of our Founding Fathers for creating the FIRST country not ruled by kings and lords and the strong dominating the weak – aka “the many ruled by the few” it gave me pause. 

Especially when he pointed out that despite their writing a Declaration of Independence of “inalienable rights” every person in the country possessed, these were men who also left “slavery intact” while restricting voting to “white men who owned property.”

Therein laid one of many contradictions that is and always has been these United States.  A group of men with “the genius to provide us with a framework that allows each generation to make our union more (Note: Or less) perfect.”

As he recounted the pushing and pulling in each direction over more than two centuries (Note: See the above speech link) I was particularly taken with a quote from a Boston minister (Note: Usually attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King) during the Civil War era. 

This was a time when slaves would escape to the freedom of northern states only to be legally captured, shackled in chains and dragged, or sailed by ship, back down south.  And once again become mere property of their masters with nothing approaching inalienable rights of life, liberty and happiness.

“I do not present to understand the moral universe,’ said Reverend Theodore Parker, one of the leading slave abolitionists from Boston at the time.  “..The arc is a long one… I cannot calculate the curve…by sight…. But from what I see, I am sure it bends towards justice.”

Point being, that despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, namely the case of a young Boston man who had just been seized and hauled away by hundreds of armed officers back into slavery, Rev. Parker had lived and experienced enough in the country to know that in the long run this would never hold and that… eventually… justice would prevail.

I wanted to chalk this up to just another inspirational, glass half-filled Obama speech until that night, while cleaning out some of the physical files in my home office I came upon a news clipping from the N.Y. Post from 1964 my mother had saved.  It was about my third grade elementary school class and I hadn’t looked at in years. 

You might not be able to make out the wording in this copy, but here’s the first paragraph:

When the sun hits the windows in class 3-303 at P.S. 86 it is filtered through the blue cardboard tulips and orange paper daisies pasted to the panes.  In that mixture of gold, blue and orange sits Efrain, the lone Puerto Rican in the class.  Four other transfer students, all Negroes, are scattered through the room.  And there are 29 white students…

Truth be told, I had no idea we were one of the first forced busing, integrated schools in the state. 

Nor did I have any idea Efrain was Puerto Rican.  I just knew his skin had a slightly bronzed tint and the straight brownish blonde hair of the time that I had always wanted (Note: Yes, even then).

But I do remember him, as the last paragraph of the article states, at the blackboard. 

And the adjacent window covered in blue construction paper and orange daisies  

Where he quickly added up a series of numbers much faster than any of the rest of us could.

As for the four “Negro” kids, it never occurred to me that this was unusual.  I didn’t really think about it.  And strange as it might seem to you now, few, if any, of the rest of us did.

That WAS America in that moment in time. 

For me.

And my friends.

And I suspect it will be again.

Or at least, can be.

Bruce Springsteen – “Land of Hope and Dreams”