Some background before the warning:
I am an Obama supporter. For the first time in my life I have become politically active. I was a precinct captain here in Santa Barbara. I canvassed; made hundreds of phone calls even to dozens people living in other states. I work very full time yet and I was moved to do so by something inside me that was sooooo tired of the status quo. I was move to do so because I was soooo afraid of the state of our union, the state of the world and of the state of the globe.
I met Obama several months ago at the event that Oprah had here. My husband who has been a vocal and active democrat was invited to attend....of course to pay too. It was a stretch but we both new that it was a once in a lifetime opportunity so we said YES. There were 1,500 people there but he was pretty accessible. I had the opportunity to talk to him some and to listen to him speak. Although some of his answers to me directly were more stump which was disappointing, the more I watched him and the more he settled in to the event the more real, the more humble and the more statesman like he appeared. I knew that I had met a president that day. At the end of the event I said ‘Good luck Mr. President’.
Now to my warning:
I can feel that there is a movement going on now. I was too young to have experienced the 60’s and the ‘love ins’ and the ‘sit ins’ but I can tell that it was a movement. It was a global reaction to repression and to the establishment. It focused, as best I can tell, on unity and hope and peace. The one thing about the 60’s was there were multiple voices all leading in the same direction. All the hope was not resting on one man to make the difference.
I am worried some now. There is a movement going on now and Barack Obama tells us the movement and the change is ‘us’ but do we really believe it? Are we really willing to take responsibility for the changes that need to be made? Barack Obama is a human first. He is a remarkable human but a human nonetheless which means he is filled with contradictions and will likely do something at sometime that could disappoint us. As we all know in ourselves, there have been times where we said something or done something that we wished we hadn’t. Maybe even overreacted in a blog here on the Daily Kos.
So my fear is that if he becomes the source of our hope and we don’t take responsibility for that hope in ourselves it is likely to be fleeting. The hope was there in us all along. He gave us an opportunity to place it somewhere, to express it, to feed it....but now what? As he will likely become the nominee for the Democrats and in fact will likely become the president what do we do then? What is our step?
Here are some of my thoughts on this:
Many of us have taken time in our lives to work on his campaign. Many also have contributed money to his campaign. It has been a grass roots campaign focusing heavily on the local level for support and success.
What if after the election we didn’t stop our efforts? But instead took our energy and focused it on issues at home, at work, in our community etc. In our country the victims from Katrina still suffer badly and waiting for the government to fix it will be a long time for many of them. What if those of us with skills, technological or others, shared them? What would our world look like then? And if per chance Obama can’t do all that he hopes to it would be okay because we did! We really were the change!