God Bless These United States

It’s a glad day for me. For the first time in my life a man I vot­ed for has tak­en the office of Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. Amer­i­ca has shown a will­ing­ness to tran­scend the prej­u­dice that has poi­soned so many chap­ters of our his­to­ry. I keep on think­ing about how it was less than fifty years ago that peo­ple were skep­ti­cal­ly whis­per­ing, «do you think that Amer­i­ca is ready to elect a Catholic Pres­i­dent?» Today proves not that Amer­i­ca is free of racism (which it isn’t) but that we are able to hold more close­ly to our ideals than we do to the sto­ries we tell when we sec­ond-guess ourselves.

This is the first time in almost two gen­er­a­tions that a Pres­i­dent has tak­en office with more than a hand­ful of peo­ple show­ing faith and hope that he can be a pos­i­tive force in gov­ern­ment. I grant that there is a wide vari­ety of opin­ion on the man, but I’m observ­ing high­er expec­ta­tions from those that vot­ed for him than for any oth­er Pres­i­dent in my life­time, and I think the two elect­ed before I was born as well. We’ve grown this cyn­i­cal shell of low expec­ta­tions to shield our­selves from the dis­ap­point­ment when our politi­cians fail us. Per­haps that’s real­is­tic even with this Pres­i­dent, but this isn’t a time for low expec­ta­tions. It’s a time to demand the best of our lead­ers and yes, to be dis­ap­point­ed and angry when they fail us.

The White House can expect let­ters from me when Oba­ma does things I think are wrong. Hav­ing expec­ta­tions means that we as a peo­ple may be will­ing to hold our lead­ers account­able, some­thing impos­si­ble when we vote for the less­er of two evils and hope things won’t get much worse.

In times of apa­thy, this nation has always got­ten mediocre lead­ers. In times of strug­gle, we’ve always found much-need­ed great­ness to put up front. I believe that we have once again found that Amer­i­can great­ness, but whether I’m right about that does­n’t much mat­ter. Today what is impor­tant is that I’m will­ing to believe in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of great­ness and to demand it if this man does not deliver.

I don’t believe that this extends just to Oba­ma’s sup­port­ers. I’ve heard con­ser­v­a­tives say again and again that though they did not vote for Oba­ma that they will sup­port him as Pres­i­dent. I did­n’t hear this from con­ser­v­a­tives when Bill Clin­ton was elect­ed and I’ve nev­er heard lib­er­als say it when a Repub­li­can was elect­ed. So to them I want to say «thank you.» It’s nev­er been more impor­tant for us to be on the same team though we may dif­fer about how to reach our goals.