A Hopeless Romantic
Thursday, November 6th, 2008I’m a hopeless romantic.
Being a hopeless romantic, I have subscribed to the RSS feed for Change.gov.
Change.gov provides resources to better understand the transition process and the decisions being made as part of it. It also offers an opportunity to be heard about the challenges our country faces and your ideas for tackling them. The Obama Administration will reflect an essential lesson from the success of the Obama campaign: that people united around a common purpose can achieve great things.
I’m not so hopeless a romantic as all that. But in this case I am hopeful. After nearly thirty years of carte blanche Republican rule and seizure of the whole kit and kaboodle by the Neocons, I’m hopeful. There will be plenty to criticize in the coming days, but I’m hopeful.
Nearly thirty years ago, I stood with a group of people who cried when Reagan was voted into office, well understanding what was to come and that the full fruits of that cornucopia would be decades unfolding toward their fullest horrors. I was only 23 but I knew I would be middle-aged and gray and paying even more heavily for that election than in Reagan’s first coming term.
The past eight years have been a terrible ordeal. Not only were oppositional voices unwelcome, we were relentlessly stigmatized as virtual enemies of the State.
Yesterday was the first time ever I’ve talked about government to H.o.p., instructing him on its branches, where I didn’t feel the prick of mocking barbed wire, that I didn’t feel we were a hated and barely tolerated minority. He is ten years of age and for the very first time I felt as if I was instructing him on possibly “our” United States, a problematic United States with much to account and atone for, where perhaps the kind of atoning for and accounting I’d see as desirable would never happen, but at least we were potentially real citizens with voices rather than scorned outcasts.
When I visited Change.org and saw “Your Administration” I looked long and hard at it.
I see it as a desire. I took it as a promise.
My heart received it as a Welcome Home.