Day of Change

Today many things come to front. Obama and his hope and change agenda is not simply looking to change things incrementally, as if fine-tuning an old television or synchronizing a watch, it is hurtling the U.S. and the world into a 21st Century conscience. The 20th Century for all its technological promise offered great human carnage and suffering. The era of two world wars, a global cold war and global economy. The social order and traditions of the 19th Century were stripped by a multitude of violence and destruction as the world found itself being pushed around by failed promises of many ideologies including the latest coined, neo-conservatism. The past six months we have witnessed the high priests of American Capitalism come desperately to the government that they previously chastised almost universally as being the root of all America's problems as the only safe harbor to save their economic empires. The failures of sweeping pronouncements that unilateral military might can solve geo-global perennial problems all legacies of the 20th Century.

Obama, possibly the most unlikely of potentials presidents when he entered into his kindergarten class in 1966, born two years after Hawaii had become a state to a young a Kenyan national collegiate student and a 18 year-old American collegiate student where they were married three months pregnant. Two-and-half years later she was granted divorce. In Obama's first grade his mother married an Indonesian national where they then moved to Indonesia where soon thereafter he had a sister. Home schooled in English he was eventually sent back to Hawaii to be raised by his grandmother where he was sent to an excellent high school as his mother returned again from what resulted in another failed marriage in 1980. The promise that has now become America's hope came from these humble and varied childhood experiences where among anything Obama is fully versed in multi-cultural, multi-racial traditions and backgrounds where he wrote in 1995 in his first book;

" In his 1995 memoir, he described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multi-racial heritage."

From here the promise unfolded but not like most other American Presidents. Yes Obama had earned scholarships, first to Occidental College in California where he met my friends Barbara and Vinai. Then onto to prestigious Columbia University where graduated stayed for a year and worked for a few firms until he took what has now become the famed community organizer stint in Chicago's poverty stricken south side. I know the south side and I tell you venturing into those neighborhoods can be scary even for a kid who grew up in hard-smitten Waukegan with its own African-American and Hispanic ghettos.

There Obama goes onto a more traditional path attending Law School at the umbra-prestigious Harvard University succeeding as the first African-American Harvard Law Review editor. It was at this point the world should have taken notice. Unlike many of his classmates Obama did not cash in during the "ME" generation returning to Chicago to lead a project vote registering 150,000 of an estimated 400,000 unregistered African-American voters in Illinois. Again there was notice as Crains' Chicago Business identified him as and under 40 year power in the city. Teaching constitutional law at the prestigious Chicago University Law School Obama also joined a law firm specializing in civil rights and neighborhood development matters. Politically he was elected to a State Senator south side seat from highly partisan and paternal Chicago he concentrated on ethics and health care reform in bi-partisan efforts. He sponsored a law increasing tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for childcare while also co-chairman of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, Obama supported Republican Governor Ryan's payday loan regulations and predatory mortgage lending regulations aimed at averting home foreclosures. He sponsored and led unanimous, bipartisan passage of legislation to monitor racial profiling by requiring police to record the race of drivers they detained and legislation making Illinois the first state to mandate videotaping of homicide interrogations along with during his 2004 general election campaign for U.S. Senate, police representatives credited Obama for his active engagement with police organizations in enacting death penalty reforms.

But was he Presidential material? In July 2004, Obama wrote himself and then delivered the keynote address at the 2004 DNC Convention, considered now his national and international coming out where he stirred a calling. In it he described his maternal grandfather's experiences as a WWII veteran in legendary Patton's Army where he benefited from FDR's New Deal and GI Bill, where then he spoke about changing the U.S. government's economic and social priorities. He explored many examples from the U.S.'s history, criticizing the heavily partisan views of the electorate and asked Americans to find unity in diversity, stating:

"There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America."

Later it was considered the highlight of the convention and confirmed his status as the Democratic Party's brightest new star. Now he went on to win the most contentious Democratic Party nomination in modern times beating the party's first family and then winning a stunning landslide victory in the general election.

For me the quote that sums up his movement is, "We are the ones we've been waiting for". Yes it is time for change, as how history seems to always find the most humble and seemingly least likely among us to rise up and lead those that have been waiting for.

What should we expect going forward? Economically things will continue to get worse. The structure of capitalism and marketplace economics is wholly out of balance in the international and domestic institutions. Debt and money are upside down. There is an over capacity, lack of need and too much productivity, projecting little prosperity. The rich and the corporate plutocracy have raped and pillaged the system for their own ME agenda's without responsibility or ethics. Politically our nation and world is without a genuine moral compass lacking the vestige to truly address social and personal injustice against the world's unprivileged. Environmentally the world is challenged with rapidly unstable climate and the prospects of serious climate change offering challenges to substantive's and survival. Militarily the means of mass killing is now being distributed to more groups with more absence of deterrence and responsibility. Poverty, injustice, famine and military threats are what propelled the 20th Century into adjunct violence on a systematic scale.

Can Obama lead this nation and the world to a place of hope and peace? Only if we allow him to pragmatically dissemble the vestiges of society's failures and move our society to a place of genuine cooperatism. It is with that on the day before his celebratory inauguration when he officially is handed the reigns of power that literally thousands possibly millions individually acted to serve others selflessly. Called the National Day of Service across America and in a previously unknown and unheralded teen shelter at our nation's capital people came together and did something that was not about me. It was a cooperative economics, not captured by any GDP ratio but its value might be bigger than the monthly retail sales report.

It was about change, and I felt it. I felt it as we collected trash on a roadside and city creek side, esthetically just making their community better. I felt it hearing about how 50 strangers showed up at a food bank center to organize there soon to be distributed food stuffs to those 14 Million recently unemployed or under employed persons in our nation. When I saw pictures of persons painting a free medical clinic or washing the windows of a literacy center. This and the countless other projects showed in part the new way.

Change can be seen by the multi-millions cramming into DC to be a small part of this moment of transition from failures of the past and the prospects of a new future. "We are the ones we have been waiting for." It is not a result but merely part of a journey, a process and painful thrust forward. I am glad to be a very small part of it.