It’s Saturday and it seems a good time to reflect on what has been a historic week. Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States. It was a big deal, and as you may have noticed, I don’t often blog about big deals. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that I don’t feel qualified to do them justice. The other is that I usually only have negative things to say about them, and I try to keep things positive here on my blog. But the beginning of Obama’s presidency represents a victory for all of us and the hope of even better things to come.
We have long in America cherished the belief that we are all created equal and held on to this thing we call the American Dream. While many of us have had to (and still have to) fight for equality, there have always been people who achieved the American Dream, keeping it alive for everyone else. Now this country has shown, by electing our first black president, that we take our ideals seriously, and Obama’s rise to preeminence is one of the greatest American Dream stories ever. I know I’m echoing Michelle Obama’s much maligned statement, but I have to say that I am finally proud of my country, too.
President Obama has his work cut out for him. I don’t expect him to fix everything that’s wrong with the country right now, but I am thrilled that he’s already begun working on some of the things that I most hoped he would change. This week he wrote the order to close Gitmo and stated unequivocally that America does not torture. If anything ever showed how poorly we followed our own ideals, Gitmo did. It was a terrible stain on our reputation. While we may have to wait a whole year to be done with it, we have at least taken the first step.
So far, so good.