Pledge of Hope

Along with millions of people around the world, I watched Barack Obama become our 44^th President this morning. For the past few days I've been listening to his words of hope and vision and today he spoke about just what not only he is inheriting as a job but what we, as the American people, are currently living under the shadow of. It is not a pretty picture. Our soldiers still fight and die on foreign soil, terrorists still look at anything American as a target for their anger and vengeance; jobs are being lost at record numbers, the financial markets are still incredibly shaky and our infrastructure has been crumbling with the lack of focus and funds. America does not currently feel like the land of opportunity – it feels like the land of 'just trying to get by.' Survival in a country that should be able to take care of its weak and sick and poor is not a given – or at least it hasn't been for quite some time now. This scares me – as a mother of three children who are emerging out into this world – as a woman who is middle aged and looking closer and closer at the future of my own aging.

And yet, within that disturbing picture of an ailing country, where we are finally beginning to see the abscesses and gross mismanagement of our heritage, what did I see today?

I was born in 1964 to a world still rife with segregation and injustice. I watched a man named Barack Hussein Obama, the son of an African immigrant and a white mother (from Kansas?), elected President of the United States. He was born into a world of strife and discord that I can't even begin to understand and with a grace that I have never seen in any politician – he has come to be the leader of my country.

America may be reeling with the sickness of what unchecked greed and warmongering can create – but what happened today was a statement as to how a country can change and grow in its own greatness.

President Obama is surely a beacon for all of us. May this country begin to finally be blessed with a little more color blindness, when a person is judged not by the color of his skin, gender, sexual orientation or religious beliefs – but for the quality of the person they are.