I'm watching Barack and Michelle enter parties and say words and look wonderful. (While I love writing and saying President Obama, I still feel a closeness and an inclination to call him Barack)
When I picked the boy up from school today, he told me about watching the inauguration. And the reason that the schools watched it is clear: this country elected and inaugurated our first black person to our highest office. This represents a closure of wounds, an opening of opportunities, a flowering of inspiration.
Is there anyone who was not moved to tears watching black residents of DC crying and celebrating today? Say to yourself "I don't discriminate". Say to yourself "I am not to blame for slavery or Jim Crow". Whatever you say does not matter. The fact is that in our nation's capital, an entire population has been disenfranchised and mostly invisible- right up to today.
That matters.
But there is more. Today is even bigger thank that.
Today is also the end of the Bush presidency, and everyone should be able to agree, an historic one. This has been a radical presidency, an administration that has not flinched from formulating new arguments, enabling the power of the White House to take steps that were momentous departures from much of what we have seen in our history, and in our system of law.
In his speech today, Barack drew a clear line, he ended it. It was not merely a rebuke- it was in eery sense of the word a place to end and start anew.
That's not even all of it, though. The election of Barack Obama is the result of what I believe is a tectonic shift in American politics. The "villagers" in Washington didn't understand it, maybe they still don't . Barack is the candidate who understood it, who grasped it, who chose to lead a changed people.
He said today that the time has come to set aside childish things, that tired dogmas of the past were done. That the questions posed by the men at our pulpits- is government too big? or too small?- meant nothing anymore, that the question is, what works?
I've been listening all month to pundits wondering if he's a liberal or a moderate, a hawk or a dove, if the "liberal base" would be angered by his pragmatism. And the thing is, they have no idea what all this means, what I really think we have voted for.
We have voted for human dignity and common purpose. We have voted for optimism, not idealism. We have voted for strength, and we have voted for an open table.
We have voted to be competent and practical, but more, we have voted to be one, in this country and with the world.
There are no labels that fit exactly what we have voted for, but our founding documents can speak to it.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
So today we started anew, and we have a chance to make significant change in the world. We gotta do it together, and I believe we have a president who wants to lead us.
We shall see, we shall see. Today feels really good, though.
