Barack Obama Church Affiliation

barack obama church affiliation

Through The Looking Glass After The Party

I usually wonder what events really meant the day after they occur. Like most people I get caught up in the actual event on the day it happens. Then, like with a bad hangover, I rethink things in the light of the next day. Today is not like other days in that regard. I read the post mortems on the inauguration of three centuries and smiled at the missing point in all of them. We have just been identified as the cause of our own problems and told that we need to fix them. We were just handed a whole load of whupass and cheered the man who did it.

Barack Obama, our new President offered to lead us in a new direction, not to hand us a better world on a silver platter. He didn’t tell us we could take time out for recess he said we needed to put aside childish things. He didn’t tell us he would take us into a new day or across some hopefully repaired bridge to somewhere better. He told us to stop building bridges to nowhere and expecting them to take us to prosperity.

In his kindness he did not so much say you have done this to yourselves and now you have to rebuild America. But he did say, “This is your job.” “I am here to lead you toward real accomplishment but it will all belong to you and you need to take ownership of all the hard dirty work it will take to get there.” That may paraphrase his words but it hits his meaning right on. He also included in his speech the workers and the soldiers and the rest of the people it took to build what we squandered in our years of excess.

 Now I am not a Baptist, just a reformed Catholic, with no church affiliation. But I know a sermon when I hear one. Luckily the weather was cold enough that the people there could hardly take the safe way out of listening to the new President. At thirteen degrees Fahrenheit if you doze, you lose toes. So they all heard him. This was more than the audacity of hope; this was a call to arms and adulthood and to rebuilding the foundations of our meaning as a nation. Yes, “meaning,” no recent French philosophers needed, thank you very much.

For those who thought they were voting for a new black model of Elvis or any other celebrated icons of our pop culture it should have been shocking. Instead: The Crowd went wild! Nothing but net! He hit it out of the park and it just kept going, and going, and going! Now we are at the morning after and carping about the cost of one day’s party is among the only negative comments. Shoot man, the banks consumed that much every day last year with 850 million left over for good measure and bonuses.

Make no mistake this is a man who means it when he says, “You are on the cleanup crew.” I am going to enjoy watching Bill and Hil fetching and carrying this man’s water around the world. No “rest on your laurels; you are a former President,” for Bill.” No, “Stay safe and sound in the Senate where you can challenge me in four years and re-divide the nation,” for Hil. Just, “Could you please help clean up the mess in Palestine, and Gaza and Iraq and Iran, and North Korea, and Africa and Asia and South America?”

The entitlement society is dead and the ownership society has arrived. So what if what we get to own are all of the problems created by the last few decades. There is hope, and where there is hope people can dream again. No Morning in America was ever like this one, except every one in my childhood. My Sainted Mother would never have said, “Get your lazy ass out of that bed and get moving.” She would smile when she pulled back the curtains and the sun streamed into my room and say, “It’s time to get up and do something interesting.”

Barack, The President, has that technique down cold. He just issued the biggest wakeup call in the history of the world and not a rooster noticed that he outdid them all. My mother slept four or so hours every day of her life and lived to be ninety. She was always up before me and I sometimes rose at four AM to earn a little money helping the neighbor milk and feed his cows. We have a lot of cows to feed and roosters to beat to the wakeup call now.

Oh yeah, “Remember how we got here but work at getting us out of this place,” is not nearly as comforting a message as some. “It’s Morning in America” was not very successful in the aggregate. Building “a bridge to the future,” led us to nowhere as certainly as if we had set out for that destination. “It’s time to get up, go to work and build us all a greater nation,” is a whole new notion taken in the light of recent Presidents past.

Watch as it catches on, it will, just think of what happened yesterday if you want to understand why. The people of this nation want to succeed at being decent more than they want power. A decent man just took office and reminded us all that our goal is a better world not one we control. That will sink in over time and we will all be richer for it!