A New Era

I'm still not sure what was more improbable, that a black man would become president, or that the Arizona Cardinals would be playing in the Super Bowl. I'll leave that question open to ponder at some other time, what is on my mind this morning, as I'm sure it is on the minds of most people right now, concerns the new era that we have entered.

Right now feels like the start of a grand road trip, all of the excitement of getting the car finally loaded up, making sure everyone has made their for the road bathroom visit, and that the cooler is stocked with goodies and is easily accessible, then backing out of the driveway and off we go. Right now we are about at the one mile mark on a trip that will see us log hundreds of miles, we are full of anticipation and hope, in my case hope that I can make it to the first rest stop before I really have to use the facilities. Drinking lots of coffee and being middle-aged have that effect on a guy.

We know that there will be plenty of ups and downs on the trip, long boring stretches of unchanging road and vistas that become a stagnant background screen with no end in sight. There will be stretches where the only thing you can get on the radio is country music and Mexican stations, and where after cycling through the dial on the seek button just one last time in the vain hope that something will magically turn up that wasn't there twenty seconds ago the last time you cycled through, you make the decision to turn the damn thing off and enjoy the silence. Until one of the kids has to go to the bathroom, which gets me because I hate to make stops, that is unless I'm the one that needs to do the stopping.

But then you get back on the road again and are presented with the challenge of passing all those cars you just passed before the last stop, the scenery starts to change, you see the first mileage sign that actually gives you hope rather than an overwhelming sense of how far left you have to go. Radio reception starts to improve, to the point where now at least you can get in a conservative talk radio show or two. I never realized until taking road trips how many immigrants come here to have babies and suck up all of our welfare, or that liberals really want to invite terrorists into their homes and plan for the socialistic subversion of all that we hold dear as red-blooded, tax paying, white Americans. Interesting what you can hear on those country music stations.

Then the vast and unchanging desert begins to give way to the beauty and endless possibilities of the mountains, the air starts to cool, the road signs actually start to inspire, and you know that your long journey is coming to an end, the destination is in sight. You reflect back over the trip and after logging hundreds of miles, think about how excited you were when you hit the first mile, then the tenth, and so on, and how long ago that now seems.

One day, hopefully in 8 years, we will be looking back at an era, the Obama era, that brought us closer to the ideals of our nation as embodied by the wise and mostly noble men who founded our republic. Hopefully we will be looking back on an era that helped to restore our faith in the ability of government to act wisely and in good faith, a government that helps those in need without hindering our individual liberties. Hopefully we will have set the bar for our leadership, at all levels of government, much higher than they have been. No longer will we consider C students who admittedly aren't big readers or hypocritical demagogues who play to our worst instincts, but we will demand our leadership to be intelligent, educated and enlightened, honorable, contemplative and considering. We will demand leaders that appeal to, in the words of one of our great leaders, the better angels of our nature.

Such is my hope for the Obama era, and while I realize that these expectations are high and that failure to reach them is certainly a possibility, I am, we all are, just starting out on this long strange trip, and there is certainly nothing wrong with some good old-fashioned American optimism that this will be a special time, and an era that we can all look back on one day with pride and joy, and have the same smiles on our faces that many of us have right now. Let the journey begin.