A Few Thoughts After the Inauguration

Along with the close to two million people who were in attendance, and the hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the world, I watched last Tuesday as Barack Obama took the oath of office of the Presidency of the United States. As with so many others witnessing the ceremony, and his subsequent inaugural address, my tears were flowing freely. Tears of joy, tears of relief, tears that were a cleansing of the glass of history, they merged with the tears and the blood and the sweat of countless others.

The mountaintop of which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of so eloquently is a mighty summit, and to reach it, so look down on the other side is an arduous ascent, but it is one we must make. There is no other way that will not lead to our destruction. The history of America is one of hardship and triumph, and of continuous struggle. I believe that the election which we have just witnessed the culmination of in that inauguration is the latest chapter in the story of that long climb. These things are never a straight up climb. Anyone who has ever hill walked around here knows that often the route to the top meanders all around the hill, often you are climbing up, but sometimes you are descending for a bit, only to head back up again. So too it seems the way to our own summit has been, long, difficult, and replete with many downward bits along the climb. In recent years, recent decades even, it has been all too easy to see the downward portions of this climb, the way up seeming more obscured in the misty clouds, with dangerous chasms at every turn, threatening us at every step. With the election of Barack Obama I truly felt like we were again heading upward, again taking positive steps that would ultimately lead us to the top. It is not the simple fact of the election, historic as it may be. It is what that election, and the process by which it all came about symbolizes.

There has been a long period in America, and in the world as well, where it is so easy to see the negative. It has been a time of division, of strife and animosity of a very bitter kind. We have devolved into a society where worth has been measured in the wealth accrued rather than the way that wealth is spent, where enemies are listed and points made by the cleverness and virulence shown in belittling them. We shout our opponents down and shut them up, hoping to win the battle for public opinion with ridicule, outrageous slander, and misrepresentation rather than by the power and the eloquence and the righteousness of our own ideas and ideals. America is tired of the rancour, the rabid partisanship, and the divisiveness that has been the hallmark of American politic over the last forty years or so. I have to admit to having played my part in the growth of this. In naïve and strident political sloganeering, and radical organizing in the 60’s and 70’s, I earned my share of blame for the way things have become. Now it’s up to me, as it is up to each one of us, to do our share in trying to bring about a healing, to nurture the growth of something better, something that beckons to the higher nature of our angels, as Lincoln called it, something that can uplift, not tear down, something that can heal, not injure, which can serve to help carry us through to our highest individual aspirations, and our greatest common good.