As the year 2008 winds to a close, we look back and see tremendous achievement and many milestones.
As the year 2008 winds to a close, we look back and see tremendous achievement and many milestones.
It was a year that saw the election of the first Black U.S. President, former Illinois Senator Barack Hussein Obama. It saw a repudiation of the politics of division and an embrace of the politics of change. It marked the end of the disaster that was the George Bush presidency that plunged the nation into both a financial and moral recession.
But while we are chortling over just how far we’ve come in 2008, here comes 2009, sweeping in like a flood, carrying with it enough pain and heartache and woe to threaten to inundate those 2008 achievements in a wash of unemployment, business closings and bankruptcies, home foreclosures, rising health insurance rates, skyrocketing food costs and taxes, taxes, taxes.
The gloom is further spread by a continuation of the war in Iraq, the expansion into Afghanistan, the saber rattling in Pakistan, the Israeli incursion into Gaza, Russia’s occupation of Georgia and the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.
As we enter 2009, the world is not a safe place, and it greets the new President-elect with a cold dose of reality amidst the warm glow of change.
What it means is that in 2009, we have to be ready for an economy that may not shake out of its doldrums for another 18 months, according to many economists, and may get worse before it gets any better.
We have to gird ourselves for the Sisyphean task of rebuilding trust in America around the world, even as we continue to engage in activities that bring that trust into question. When we have a president who refuses to even talk to those nations he feels are not our friends, then we can be sure that there can be no basis for them to become our friends.
We have come to expect that President-elect Barack Obama will bring a sober and reasoned analysis to our problems and not react with bombast and emotion in the place of common sense. We are sure that he’ll be up to the job.
But the job is not just his. We have to realize that even though he is president, he cannot do everything, especially in economic matters.
He can propose fixes and institute changes, but the bootstraps we have to pull on are our own, and while he can provide leadership, we have to roll up our sleeves to do the heavy lifting.
That means that in 2009, we are the change we’ve been waiting for. It means that in 2009, our job is to make this city, this state, this nation, this world, a better place. There is promise in the New Year. It is up to us to fulfill that promise.
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