As unemployment grows, partisanship deepens, and war lingers on, things certainly don't look as hopeful as they did 20 months ago when Barack Obama took office. But there's still hope. We just need to remember where to look for it.
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Remember January 2009? That month, the country witnessed the historic inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of the United States of America. "The skinny kid with a funny name" upended the political establishment, running on a campaign of hope and change. So many of us expected that his administration would usher in a new, golden era of progressive policy and thought in Washington. No more politics as usual, we all agreed. Some heralded the start of a new, "post-racial" era in American life. It was hard for even the most jaded pessimist not to get suckered in.
Fast-forward to the present: summer 2010. While there have been some landmark victories and accomplishments, they have been overshadowed by the plethora of watered-down compromises and outright defeats. Politics has indeed departed from its usual course, but only in that the level of partisan bickering seems to have reached an all-time high. Plus there's rampant unemployment; the massive national deficit and the accompanying looming specter of what that means for our future; and a war effort that is only getting worse with no easy exit strategy. On top of that all, along came the Shirley Sherrod incident, eradicating any holdouts still desperately grasping onto the myth of a "post-racial" America. Now the "Ground Zero mosque" controversy threatens to pull us further apart as a nation.
And it appears despair is contagious, because progressives aren't the only ones suffering the doldrums. Americans of all ideological backgrounds and partisan bents seem to be in dour moods. A majority of people believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. Politicians from both sides of the aisle (and even those in the middle), are quaking in their boots as the anti-incumbent, anti-Washington sentiment has swept the nation. It's simply a hard time to be an optimist.
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SOURCE: Urban Faith
Johnathan Smith is a New York-based lawyer. He also serves as a youth minister at Gethsemane Baptist Church. This article appears courtesy of a partnership with Sojourners.
