Topic: Concert for Obama

Watching history: Making “the dream” real

January 20, 2009 |

I awoke this morning from a dream, knowing that in a matter of hours I would be witness to a dream.

As President-elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office for the United States presidency, I find myself holding my breath, hardly able to believe that this reality. I find myself filled with pride.

I have no great expectations that he will be able to effect change, to immediately solve our country’s woes: I am a realist and the problems we face as a nation will take not months but years, possibly terms, to resolve and set right. I am ready for that.

I took time, though, to reflect on my personal history, remembering how the marches in Alabama and in Washington D.C. played out on that black and screen with the rounded edges, back in the 60s in the parlor of my blue-collar working class home.  I’d watched the dream of the Kennedy election and the horror of his assassination, I followed the civil rights movement, listened to the “I have a Dream” speech, and was caught up — I believe righteously so — in the passion and fervor of those times. I was part of the peace movement then, staunchly  anti-war and pro-human and civil rights. Nothing’s changed. «Read the rest of this article»

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