A New Era

We're entering a new era with the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. I've tried to help as best I could with my donations to the Obama campaign, and with interaction on major political blogs trying to combat the avalanche of smears and lies that proliferated these past months. Now, the hard part is waiting until he actually takes office, and searching for the best ways I might be able to help. I'm not sure if that will include more posts to this blog, but anything is possible right now. I absolutely don't believe we can all just go back to our normal lives now. Since we first saw the darkening storm clouds on the horizon, much more time has passed with very little action, and few would disagree that it's now a full-scale emergency.

The economic downturn is only the tip of the iceberg. I think we're seeing a widespread global disillusionment in old ways of thinking as reports of failure continue to roll in. I believe it's a terrible mistake to think we can sit back and just kibitz as a new president and congress prepare for their upcoming terms. President-Elect Obama has often reminded us that change happens from the bottom up, and we here at the bottom need to embody that change, and begin building consensus for the things we need to see. I feel gratified that so many of the things I've written about most passionately in these pages have revealed themselves to be such important parts of today's dialogue. It makes me feel greater confidence that I'm on my way to understanding, and that I've not gotten too lost or sidetracked by personal prejudice or confusion. But the learning curve is still very steep, and this new vista of possibility has me, for the moment, almost overwhelmed.

There's a new web site associated with Obama at http://www.change.org/, and I've joined it while selecting my personal cause as Fair Trade. I don't always react well to specializing in one particular area, so I selected Fair Trade since it seems to be such a broad umbrella, including the economy, the environment, and worker/human rights as part of its purview. I'm currently studying the topic as it's viewed on the change.org web site, and watching to see if this url or some other becomes a hub from which change can take place. I'm not sure yet either what I can do, or how, but I want to be a part of this somehow. I think we're in a time where so many of the prevalent methods have failed that it provides us an opportunity to take some profound new directions, and I believe it's likely we're not going to do enough unless we're prodded by revolutionary ideas.

I'm mature enough to see that too much change can frighten many to such an extent that change itself, however well-intentioned, can be counter-productive. It's going to be difficult to find the right mix between patient, long-term perspectives and the very fierce urgency of now. For the moment, it's just good to bask in the warm glow of a nation of voters who have in many ways rejected the misguided direction of Bush, Cheney and the NeoConservatives who found a perhaps half-hearted ally in John McCain. Very soon, our prayers for a chance to turn things around will have come to be, and given a government who will listen, we need to know for sure what it is we wanted to say. Be careful what you wish for, they tell us. The problems we inherit are surely more than we bargained for, and our task ahead is daunting in the extreme.

I know that the only right choices will be the ones that embody compassion, and that must extend to those who were wrong as well as those who were wronged. Whatever we do, I know it's going to take a lot of prayer, or meditation in my case. It's going to take a whole lot of love to see the right path to take from here.

Here's to tomorrow!

Update: Actually, the Obama-affiliated site is http://www.change.gov. Guess I'm not used to seeing a .gov site I can believe in. There's a painful period of adjustment here.