I have hope.

I have hope people. I don't think that it ever occured to me how hopeless I felt about the world, how horrible and sullen I felt until Barack Hussein Obama came along and told all of us we could hope and we could change.


He isn't Super Man. He can't fix everthing. As much as I'd like to be able to point Obama at all the world's problems and zap! have them all fixed with a beam of Obama charisma, I know that this is fantasy, but I also think I know something else from watching and listening to the man this whole time.

I've watched my beloved town, then state, disintegrate, die. It is painful for me to even think about my industrial, beautiful-ugly city die, it's great steel plants belching their dying breaths, its once prosperous people lost and abandoned as the world changes and leaves them behind for the glittering lies of Suburbia and the vanilla myths of prosperity---those myths that say that working hard is enough, that everyone can live in their own cookie cutter castle and that this is right, true, that they deserve this. Well, I know this isn't true. I know that in my heart of hearts, America is sick, it's been drinking too strongly from it's own white myths and these myths are killing us.  My town is dying from poverty, from abandonment and neglect, it is suffering from outside forces beyond it's controll and the people here can't just get jobs, can't just work a little harder and make it right. It's impossible in this country. There is no labor movement. There is no voice for the powerless to speak back to the powerful and have them listen. Those of us who are fortunate, who are priveleged don't know our own history, we don't know the hidden, sad, horrible truths of our history hides. We forget these things as easily as we click past a blog entry we don't want to read. We can, because we have power.

However, our new President, he know these things. He walked the lean streets of Chicago before he joined the echelons of power. He knows that it takes more than the market and getting off welfare and fixing social security to make things better, to make them just. He knows these things, knows better than to hold every human accountable for things that are not theirs to account for. His knowledge of these things reverberates in his speeches. And more importantly, millions of us, having listened to the man, know that we don't have to be hopeless, blind, ignorant, we can be part of the future, the part that builds and shares, not destroys and hordes its privileges. We don't have to be without hope. We can be part of the answer.