The Student Who Almost Ran over Me

As I walked out of Walgreens this afternoon with a fresh supply of cold medicine and some Smart Water, a white car kept going once I had started crossing the parking lot to my car. She gave a little wave of apology, and I thought to myself, "Is that Cleo?" It turned out it was. She is a student in my class on the Naval base, and I asked her if she'd almost run me down. She asked which Walgreens and said, yes, she had been there, and she kind of remembered that. She did reiterate that she had waved in apology, and she apologize again. She was in a hurry, she said. She had to take dinner to her wife and make a bank deposit.

I joked that it would go down on her permanent record that she tried to run over me, and didn't think much about it all until after class. If not for the efforts of President Obama -- and other forward-thinking leaders -- she would have had to sacrifice either her military career or her marriage. How sad is that? The don't-ask, don't-tell policy put into effect by former President Clinton seems positively archaic now, although I'm sure it seemed quite controversial and progressive at the time. My student is just one person who has benefitted from the new rules. I'm sure there must be at least thousands of others, but I'd never thought about it in quite that way until tonight when my student in the military mentioned her wife.

When conservatives talk about racism and other "isms" becoming worse under Obama's term in office, I will always think about this student and the many other people in situations similar to hers. The advances in civil rights over the past almost-eight years are surpassed only by those that occurred in the sixties. Of course, people are always going to hate what they don't understand or what doesn't fit neatly into their perceptions of how others should live (or look), but how amazing it is that groups of people who probably never thought they would see same-sex marriage in their lifetimes or acceptance of gays in the military have seen both in such a short period of time.