No Good Thing Ever Dies

I am sitting in the exact spot I sat when I watched President Obama deliver his inaugural address. I am watching Sportscenter today, nothing spectacular, although a young wide receiver has died tragically, so there is much less levity this morning, and the sad music is playing.

Anyway, I've been listening to that Avett Brothers song a lot. There's a repeated line, "And your life doesn't change by the man that's elected." The song itself isn't about politics, it's about right and wrong as real things, not some conceptual, pie in the sky ideas that people with graduate degrees sit and think about in a dark room. Right and wrong was easy when we were five. Stealing: wrong. Hitting: wrong. Helping: right. Sharing: right. Simple stuff.

To some degree, that is still the case. Stealing? Wrong. Hitting? Wrong. Helping and sharing? Still right. But what about our President? What's right and wrong for him? War? Universal health care? Taxes? Eleven months on the job and Americans still can't decide what's right and wrong. The president's approval numbers are steadily declining; and he hasn't been the inspiring leader we all thought he would be. His poetry has turned to prose. His saving grace is that the most visible and vocal Republican is Sarah Palin, and even she is becoming more well known for her indiscretions than she is for anything else. Meanwhile, she's spending her newly found free time filming bits for The Tonight Show like she's Dean Martin.

We still don't have health care. It took almost a year for decisive action in Afghanistan. Nothing has been done about crime, nor gay marriage. In short, our lives haven't been changed by this man. But then, is it realistic to expect that all of our lives WOULD change because of one man? And if one man could change all of our lives, why were we all so sure it would be Obama?

It's the same reason we still are today. Hope.

It's something we stopped talking about after the inauguration. But it's something we need to remember. Hope is the reason we all listened when he spoke during the primaries, and the reason half a million people regularly came to hear him speak. Hope. Hope is the reason I voted for him. Not because I hoped he would be a good President, or because I hoped he would win. (I knew he would win.) When I voted for him, I hoped it would signal a change in the ideals of the people. All that civics class stuff about America being a melting pot, and being more united than divided, blah blah blah.

I still hope. But hope isn't enough. There's another line in that Avett Brothers song, and that's what we all need to do. "Decide what to be and go be it."