Dear Former President Barack Obama and Former First Lady Michelle Obama,
History has a way of revealing the truth, eventually.
Like the sun gradually coming up over the horizon and burning away the darkness concealing everything around it, the unfolding years chase away the noisy bombast of social media rhetoric, knee-jerk think pieces, and in-the-moment emotion, leaving us with the unvarnished reality of people and their lives.
This will be true of you, and your service, and of the mark you have left upon the world, too. Your beautiful, brilliant body of work will testify loudly on your behalf far beyond these days, and in this way, your legacies are secure, both individually and as a couple.
But what may be less apparent looking back from the distance of time will be something that is less easily quantifiable: character.
Over the past two decades, I’ve watched you.
I’ve watched you absorb a billion body blows from your critics—brutal words that run far deeper than policy or platform; monstrous thoughts assembled within poisoned minds long before you served a single day in office.
I’ve watched you hounded by the Molotov cocktails of thinly veiled or overt racism claiming to be objective opposition.
I’ve watched you and your children attacked with a ferocity and cruelty that defy any sense of decency, and that certainly have no precedent.
I’ve watched your birthplace called into question, your personal faith ridiculed, your patriotism mocked, your gender contested, and your very humanity discounted.
I’ve watched you endure the incessant, bitter venom of those for whom the color of your skin was always going to be a problem.
And through all of it, I’ve watched you be the better humans, always going high despite their sickening depths.
In the face of a sustained, spitting, violent, raw-throated hatred, you’ve never responded in kind.
You never allowed yourselves to be defined by the bigotry of your enemies, and you never dehumanized them or let them win by becoming them.
This, Mr. and Mrs. Obama, is perhaps your greatest legacy: the way you retained your dignity in the midst of the most undignified behavior of your adversaries.
The truth is, good, honest people here understand that the White Evangelicals, Republican leaders, and far too many of our white family members, friends, and neighbors were simply never going to be okay with a couple of color leading them and succeeding—and yet you have done both.
Two decades later, those same people still strain to bait you into a reciprocating bitterness so that you would fulfill their toxic prophecies of you, while you simply continue to do what you do with nobility, compassion, good humor, and steadfast, unapologetic conviction.
You live the tangible love for neighbor that so many of your professed Christian critics preach but rarely model.
As a father, I realize that my children are always watching me, always taking cues from the way I treat people, from how I respond to adversity, from how I care for those in pain, from how I face mistreatment. I know that for them, my words will always be secondary to my conduct; that how I live will always trump what I say.
This is where I find my deepest gratitude for you both in these days, and I know I’m not alone. There are tens of millions of Americans who feel the way I feel.
Today, as much as ever, your unceasing humanity is spurring us on to speak and move and work for the inherent value of all people, regardless of the cost or the wounds or the attacks from those who would deny it.
We are chasing equality and justice together, unfettered by the words of our detractors.
We are trying to live fiercely yet honorably.
We are working to stand upon principles and never upon people.
We are seeing the way you continue to live and are moved to live similarly.
You are still pointing us to our highest ideas and appealing to our better angels.
So, please forgive me if I speak informally right now, and if I use words so often brandished sardonically by your detractors to try and ridicule the work you’ve done and the life you’ve lived and the grace you’ve shown.
Without a trace of irony or sarcasm, let me simply say:
Thanks, Obamas.
