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A Historic Moment
Wednesday - November 05, 2008 02:00 PM in
by Peter Leppik
I've made a conscious effort to keep politics out of this blog, even though (as readers of my personal blog know) I've been supporting Obama for President since late 2007.
Yesterday's election was, I believe, one of the few truly historic moments I will see in my lifetime, on par with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the 9/11 attacks. When Barack Obama was born, there were places in this country where he would have been treated as a distinctly second-class citizen, and where he could have exercised his right to vote only with considerable difficulty and personal risk.
Today he is our President-Elect.
As a result, millions of Americans can now honestly answer "Yes" when their children ask, "Is it true that anyone can become president?"
Just as important, Obama achieved his victory by appealing to the best in people, with a message of hope, inspiration, and competence at time of enormous national challenges. I don't think he will achieve everything his supporters hope he will, but just the simple fact of his election sends a powerful message of who we are as a country.
We are, in short, a country which has its faults but struggles to overcome them. We are a country which, in our most difficult hours, turns to humanity's highest ideals.
For me, the past few years have been difficult to watch, as I saw our elected representatives abandon many of the principles our country was founded on in a shortsighted and misguided effort to increase our security and preserve their own power.
I always believed, however, that this excursion was temporary. One of the most ingenious aspects of our system of government is the way it corrects excesses and abuses, even if that process is sometimes agonizingly slow. Obama will not fix all our problems, but his election is a repudiation of the way this country has been governed for the past several years.
I can think of no better way to sum up than this quote from Obama's speech last night:
And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright: Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.| | |