A Year Ago Today.

I was so excited and moved. I was hopeful. I drove home from NPR Headquarters in downtown D.C. where I'd been to watch and blog about the returns, through normally silent streets that were filled with people screaming, laughing, crying, dancing. Dancing. This city hadn't danced like that, collectively, in my lifetime.

Progress is difficult. Hatred and complacency are tough obstacles. None of us are truly privy to the information we would need about our governments - local, state, Federal - to draw the most informed conclusions. I truly believe this. I think that the most intelligent and well-informed among us simply do not know, and would not know unless we were sitting in certain seats. As black and white as we like to pretend it is, there is way too much gray.

I choose to remain hopeful.

I choose to try to understand what other people believe and why, unless they're completely off the rails or abusive in word or deed. I choose to remember that after nine months of George Bush's first term, I had seen nothing, nothing to thrill me and nothing to make me uneasy, until the world fell apart and then there were years of devastation and there the pieces lay for someone else to try to put together, a nearly impossible task, in my eyes.

I don't know enough to draw any conclusions yet, but I will only say that I believe how people felt a year ago today continues to have merit. And I will say that in the dissent I hear - and welcome, in principle, because I treasure the concept of democracy and our precious right to free speech - I hear much more hatred and negativity than I hear progress and solutions, and I hope that is more a defect in my perception than it is a reality.

I still believe that change takes time.

Comments

[jodifur]

beautiful post

[Megan H]

I was in my shared office yesterday listening to a bunch of people talk about how let down they feel by Obama because he "hasn't delivered on his promise for change" and "hasn't done enough." I find this baffling because the man hasn't even been in office for a year yet. He inherited a mess of mythic proportions and we're not even going to give him a year? I wanted to ask them what they have accomplished in their jobs in the past 8 months. How much have you done? Maybe Obama won't be able to deliver, but, for god's sake, can we at least give him a realistic amount of time before we start saying he failed? It's so disheartening.

[Tacopronto]

I'm honestly more excited to see that President Obama hasn't hastily reacted to a bad situation without fully understanding the nature of the problem, which I am convinced no one does. I believe Obama is doing the absolute best thing he could be doing right now, letting muddy water settle.