Aren't I too young to say . . . " I never thought I'd see the day ".

I work in an environment where I manage a team that bests me in age on average, by twenty years. People who have lived in era's that I can only imagine or at best, read about in books. People who have watched lives and livelihoods change with the times and men reach new highs and repent for all time lows. People who have seen dreams become realities. Yet, in my relative infancy, I find myself sharing their sentiment when they pronounce, " I never thought I'd see the day" in regards to the election of a black President.

It causes me to explore that statement; "I never thought I'd see the day". Be it that I am the young age of 30 (my younger friends would argue the "young" descriptive), I wonder if I am far too young to utter this phrase. It is a phrase which expresses despair and jubilation in succession.

The despairing part is that in the course of history of a country 400 plus years in the making, the citizens (and I stress this word purposely for our citizenship was and has been in question for much of that time frame) that help form it's greatness could not fathom the notion that they had just as much an opportunity to hold the greatest office in its land. The jubilation is the realization of the dream that those same citizens maintained, despite times of despair and treatment that supported the contrary; the dream that anything is possible.

Discouraging is it that you can hear this same feelings set from the mouths of young people who I best by only 15 years. Teenagers whose lives are all but in front of them, astonished that the face they see in the mirror now mimics the one they will see on the cover of every newspaper, every magazine, on the screen of every news station as the leader of the free world.

It is telling of a future that to some, isn't as bright as it should be. A deplorable frame of mind that even in the beginning, as the shot that starts the sprint of your life still rings in your ear, the race is all but over.

But then. . . along comes hope.

The hope that in a race from which the only vantage view you have ever had of the finish line is blurred by the backs of others ahead of you, something changes. The race is extended an extra lap, and you are a tail end runner who performs best in his or her last 100 strides. Or someone has stumbled ahead of you, permitting you to narrow the gap that separates the haves and have-nots.

I must learn not to say "I'd never thought I'd see the day", for that recitation may elude to those younger than I that change and hope are two things that are far to rare in their occurence. And I dare not be a discouraging voice to those who have come after me, for it would be an offense to those who have come before me.