After the inspired and deeply moving election of Barack Obama, I feel an unexpected sense of sadness. This sadness is coupled with a feeling of loss for an America I grew up with, an America embraced by my family, an America that was already on its last legs decades ago. With Obama’s election we turn the corner decisively on this old America, a place of cowboys and indians, good old boys and pickup trucks. These ‘good old’ Americans will wander in circles, dazed, not knowing what hit them. Did anyone get the number on that Prius? What the hell is a Prius, anyway? One thing is for certain: the old Americans are fading away. They do not understand, nor will they ever understand, what happened, and that is a tragedy. The worst of them will rail against Obama and waste their energy trying to tear him down. The best will look inward, perhaps with great discomfort, in an attempt to understand who or what they have become. They will begin to sense the reasons for their irrelevance, and how change must not only come to Obama’s America, but also to the America they believed in, an America that exists today only as a caricature of what it once was, for sale in cowboy magazines or discount furniture shops.
A note to all you so-called ‘new’ Americans out there:
Do not think unkindly of the old Americans and their conservative ways. Now more than ever they need someone to lift them up, someone to let them know how to move forward into this brave new America. It is your job, new American, to help them understand, and above all to help them see that the currency of this land isn’t money, but love--love for everyone--and that this love is unconditional. This unconditional love cannot be bought, sold or voted away. It is the promise of Obama’s America, a promise two hundred years in the making, and no matter what happens, nothing will ever be the same again.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
"In a remarkable speech delivered a year to the day before his death, Dr. King had said that "We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.... A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.... A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just."
From here: http://www.shalomctr.org/node/1457
Post a Comment