Donate to Noozhawk Today

Santa Barbara-Goleta, Friday, January 09, 2009

Weather: Fog 50º

Noozhawk.com Logo

Point of View »Commentary: Election Brings Hope and Renewal

Commentary: Election Brings Hope and Renewal

By Deborah Brasket | Posted on 11/17/2008

E-MAIL PRINT COMMENT SHARE

SB CAN stands ready to uphold the ideals of Obama's promise.

Public celebrations all across the world and tears of joy marked the culmination of a truly amazing presidential campaign on Nov. 4. In significant measure, the historic election of Sen. Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States was an unprecedented grassroots effort, the kind we at Santa Barbara County Action Network, or SB CAN believe in and celebrate.

This grassroots effort has been at least four years in the making. In reflecting upon this momentous occasion, it’s worth remembering that four years ago after the re-election of President Bush, many of the same people who are now dancing in the streets were “mourning a sense of lost hope,” as I wrote then in a column at the time. In trying to make sense of that loss, I lamented that “maybe things have to get really, really bad” before people would realize we were heading in the wrong direction and be ready to turn things around:

"Maybe the budget deficit needs to quadruple and the trade deficit lead us toward bankruptcy,” I wrote, more prophetically than I realized. “Maybe more jobs need to be lost, more homeless fill our streets, more uninsured swamp our hospitals. ... Maybe the middle class needs to be squeezed into nonexistence.  Maybe we need to lose the America we love in order to really appreciate what we had, and fight to get her back.”

I struggled to find where we had gone wrong and how to get it right: “Clearly if people voted for Bush on moral issues (as the media then were concluding), progressives need to do a lot more work to articulate clearly and strongly our own moral platform. And clearly people of faith need to do more soul-searching when prioritizing moral concerns. Since when do abortion, gay marriage and school prayer trump war, poverty, corporate greed, lost jobs and a failing health-care system as moral issues?”

As I wrote at the time, I found the inspiration I needed to stay engaged at an SB CAN monthly meet-up where people like me “had struggled through their own grieving process and moved beyond despair and acceptance to hope and renewal.” Clearly Bush’s re-election was “re-inspiring progressives” to rediscover “what we really stand for, and how this vision of peace and prosperity can unite Americans in a way that Bush” was unable to achieve. Maybe, I speculated, we needed four more years “to sift through the rubble of defeat and forge a newer, cleaner, higher platform of political ideals ... founded on clear moral values that all Americans can embrace.”

I ended the column with this hope: “Maybe the stage is being set for the election in 2008, when a presidential candidate who embodies these ideals can reunite the nation, and restore our original greatness. The struggle for social and economic justice, for a clean and healthy environment, for a peaceful and prosperous world has never been easy. But the worthiness of our cause strengthens and nourishes us along the way. As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote: ‘The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.’”

Truly, Obama seems to embody the ideals we need today to reunite our nation. Four years of grassroots effort to redefine ourselves and articulate a vision of hope has led to this moment because, as he always insisted, the campaign was really about us. But to ensure our success, we will need to remain fully engaged in the political process to support those we elected to lead us, and to hold them and ourselves accountable as we strive to fulfill our highest ideals as Americans.

Deborah Brasket is executive director of the Santa Barbara County Action Network (SB CAN). She can be reached at 805.722.5094 or at . This commentary originally appeared in the Santa Maria Times.

Share

Sign up for the Noozhawk Newsletter

Comments (3)

Post a Comment

(Comments are moderated, and will not appear until they've been approved.)

Name:

» AN50 wrote on 11/17/08 @ 05:43 PM

Please Deborah, tell us what moral platform you stand on is. If by progressive morals you mean taking from successful by force and giving to failures the idiots in power already beat you to the punch. Oh, ok you mean taking from the rich and giving to the poor, even though that means everyone is now poor and there is no incentive for anyone to do better. Or is it the progressive moral of equivocating morality, like fighting a war for the liberation of a country from a ruthless dictator is as bad as flying planes into skyscrapers because you hate the liberal permissiveness of the “great Satan”? Let’s see there is also the idea of killing babies so I can fornicate without the “moral consequences” of using my sex organs as a pleasure drug. Hmmm, what else is on the progressive moral platform? We have the old affirmative action policy, code for you’re too stupid a minority to do it on your own so powerful and intelligent whitey will have to game it so you don’t feel so bad. Or maybe, the indelible progressive morality that says “if it feels good, do it”? Oh I know, how about the one that says there is no God, we evolved from an amoeba (still can’t figure out where the amoeba came from though) and all things in nature happen by random chance, yet everything that man does is unnatural, hmmm. I was once a progressive, young idealistic and stupid. I grew up, took on the responsibility of a family and realized that liberalism was selfish and destructive. I realized that traditional values were there because they worked and survived the test of time and consequences. I realized that when I had no responsibility to anyone else that liberal policies were good in that they placed responsibility on the state instead of the individual. I was free to play. However, raising children makes one realize that you do not produce effective, productive adults capable of taking care of them by doing everything for them. Too bad progressives never learned that lesson themselves. Nope let the great nanny state take care of everything so I can spend my lifetime as a child.

» Your Ideas wrote on 11/19/08 @ 07:58 AM

But Anso your solutions to everything have been tried the past 8 years by your leaders and look where we are today. Things could not be worse if Snoopy the Dog were President. Maybe you should look up the definition of insanity?

» AN50 wrote on 11/19/08 @ 04:54 PM

So sorry, Your Ideas. But the practices of the Country Club Oligarchs, formerly known as the GOP are not my ideas. When you and all the other partisan hacks figure out the difference between republican, democrat, conservative and liberal, I will be glad to expound on my ideas. Further more you ought to be careful how you throw the blame. Liberal democrats had control of the house the last 2 years. But hey if you like we can start blaming Obama now before they swear him in and follow the Bush Derangement Syndrome model.


» The Noozhawk Network