Change for Good

I still remember when I first heard the news that two planes had hit the World Trade Center towers on September 11th, 2001. I remember the overwhelming feelings of shock, horror, grief, and anger.

After that day, people said that the world had changed and that nothing would ever be the same again, and in some ways that prophecy has come true, at least in terms of America's innocence about its insulation from acts of international terrorism.

Tomorrow, Americans will again mark an occasion that some people claim will change the Presidency forever. No race to win the highest office in the land will ever be the same again.

On Tuesday, January 20th, 2009, a man of mixed African and American heritage, claiming both black and white parents, and embodying an ancestry unlike any other American president will take the oath of office and break a color barrier I never thought I would see breached in my lifetime.

This time the feelings that many Americans are experiencing run the gamut from joy to celebration to hope and perhaps to an underlying degree of anxiety, either on behalf of Mr. Obama's safety or out of personal concern about what a “black” presidency will mean for white America.

All eyes will be turned to Mr. Obama tomorrow, not just the eyes of Americans who will feel the direct effects of his Presidency, but the eyes of the entire world, who are watching with wonder and amazement at the improbable success of this unconventional candidate.

Barack Obama has captured the imagination of so many Americans and so many people around the world precisely because he represents so many things to so many different people.

He is an intellectual, educated at Columbia and Harvard and a professor at the University of Chicago. He is a member of an academic elite, but he is not an elitist, choosing rather to emphasize the opportunities that education offers all of its citizens.

Despite his academic background, he is also a pragmatist, a man who remains calm in the face of crisis, and who welcomes dissenting views, even as he remains confident in his own judgment.

He is a man on the very edge of the boomer generation, a man who only knew the Civil Rights movement, and women's liberation, and the Vietnam War from the perspective of a child. He is a product of its legacy without bearing the burden of taking one side or another during one of America's most turbulent periods of social change.

He is a man who has transcended class, race, and geographic boundaries. He has known poverty in his youth and witnessed poverty in Indonesia. He has refused to let himself be bound by race but has taken the unusual perspective, now shared by a growing number of Americans, that having parents of two different races gives to our understanding of racial difference and how it might be bridged. He is a citizen of the United States, but also a citizen of the world, having lived abroad and traveled to countries in Africa and Southeast Asia that have largely remained apart from the consciousness of most Americans.

He is a man who knows the Constitution intimately, having taught its legal history, but his interest in this seminal document exceeds the boundaries of the classroom and the courtroom to include his personal knowledge of what it means to fight for social justice and to survive the rough and tumble politics of Chicago.

He is a man who does not pay lip service to the ideals of community service but uses the day before his inauguration to call all Americans to participate in their communities by cleaning up parks, serving meals to the homeless, giving blood, gaining new skills through training, and sharing these experiences with friends and families.

There is certainly good reason to say that the world will have changed after Barack Obama takes office tomorrow, and given the fervent response of so many Americans to this historic occasion, we can also claim that this is change for good, a lasting change, and one that will benefit all those citizens who see in President Obama, a symbol of their dreams for their own future and the future of the nation.