As President Obama prepares to escort the now former President Bush to his helicopter, which will take him back to Texas, we can only hope that this is genuinely the start of a new moment in America’s history.
There are inevitably clichés associated with this historic moment, and there is hope. Tomorrow we see whether that hope and immense promise can begin to be transformed into tangible results, but there have been promising steps thus far.
Still, with this one helicopter ride, and an anti-climactic inauguration (as Obama officially became President at noon, despite the oath of office not having been administered), there is an immense amount of hope for me that an ugly chapter of America’s history is about to be ended.
The time has come to repair our nation, to repair the damage we have caused to ourselves and to the rest of the world, whether in domestic policy and issues relating to torture and wiretapping, or whether through our foreign policy, rebuilding alliances, repairing the violence we have unleashed on the world. The time has come to repair our economy, to hopefully try and make it a more just and equitable economy, so that as the richest nation on earth, we no longer have inadequate schools, high infant mortality, poor health care, and people struggling to get by despite working themselves to the bone just to get by.
There is much riding on Obama, many expectations, some of which will inevitably be disappointed. But there is a considerable amount of hope today, that this is genuinely the beginning of something new, something great, and something that will bring powerful change to the world as we know it.
