Robert F. Kennedy often said (while paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw), “Some people see things as they are and say why. I see things that never were and say why not.”
In the terrible year of 1968, in a hotel in Los Angeles, the dreams expressed in that statement died and in the tumultuous Democratic convention that followed in Chicago, whatever hopes that remained for a real change of direction in the country were permanently put to rest.
Or so it seemed, at least to many people who lived through those tragic times. But almost exactly 40 years later, out of that same Chicago, from the land of Lincoln, those dreams and hopes have now been resurrected and given new life.
No one knows how successful America’s new president will be when he takes office in January. We do know that Barack Obama will work as hard as he can to ardently repair the nation’s economic wounds, strive to end the social divisiveness that troubles this country and end one unpopular war while winning another.
The torch has been passed to him just as it was to another young president on a cold winter’s day in January 1961. Once that time seemed so long ago, dimmed by the fog of history. Yet now it seems like yesterday.
Barack Obama expresses those progressive values and qualities that have made America the great country it has been and aspires to be to the rest of the world. He has asked Americans to reach for the better angels of our nature, just as Lincoln once implored a divided nation.
America, the land of equal opportunity, of immigrants and diversity. How Obamaesque. We have found our story again. Here and around the world, people have been rejoicing. America is back. Finally.
Barry Fulmer
Freehold Township