Originally Posted on Crossleft.org on Fri, 07/29/2005 - 17:37 — Looks like Obama saw that the country desperately needed hope and ran his campaign promising to deliver on that need.
In my last post I spoke about the need for vision. For any hopes of vision we need hope.
I must admit, in the early morning hours of election night 2004, I was devoid of hope. I was driving back from Boston after 2 days of doing my small part by campaigning in Philadelphia. I had told myself that I would get back to Boston in time for a victory celebration. A little after 1 am, I was somewhere between Hartford and Boston, when NPR seemed pretty sure that Ohio was going to Bush. I was nothing short of devastated.
How could a man who had:
- stolen the last election through absolute fraud,
- been asleep at the wheel on the terrorism threat leading to the greatest ever attack in our country,
- led the country into war based on lies and fabrications
- cut taxes to the rich
- cut services to the poor
- balooned the federal deficit to record high levels
- eased common sense environmental restrictions
- acted with wanton disregard of historical alliances and friendships between the US and European nations
- given no bid contracts in the order of many billions to a company that the vice-president was still getting a pay check from in deferred income to rebuild the country he blew up
- so viciously and unethically attacked political opponents starting with Ann Richards, moving onto speaking at a segregationalist college to attack John McCain in South Carolina, to the Swift Boat stuff with John Kerry
- limiting speech and privacy through the Patriot Act
- claim God and the flag, in the name of all of his work
BE RE-ELECTED!?!
What were the America people thinking? What was middle America thinking? So many people had worked so hard to unseat the evil that this administration had imposed. So many people beared their souls to speak the truth in the face of long odds. The anti-war protests, the blogs, the email campaigns, the postering, the knocking on doors. So much effort was seemingly wasted. For a few weeks, I lost hope, lost faith.
And that's when i realized...I had to pick myself up. There was little time for despair. I had to join with other to decide what we progressives stand for. We had been talking largely to ourselves throughout all of this and we had been largely negative, attacking Bush and saying what we're not. If we were going to have any hope in the future we would need to engage Christians from across the spectrum to reclaim the Word that inspires hope in each of us.
Hope implores us to put forward a positive vision of the world that inspires even further hope. Hope demands that we can define that vision in practical terms that are atttainable over the long term. Hope is nourished by the faith that we share.
And this, in my estimation, is what CrossLeft is about. Defining vision, inspiring hope, relying on faith.
More on faith next time.