Congrats! I'm Expecting!!!

Yeah, we all are.

All of us who have waited for our beloved country to lurch back towards the left.

Or towards what would ostensibly, realistically and fairly be called the new center.  

Because let's be honest.  It ain't like we're gonna be moving FAR SOVIET UNION LEFT into some kind of totalitarian nightmare where we're on camera all the time, wearing drab uniforms, walking around like the living dead and subsisting on a diet of gruel.

That's for Wal-Mart employees.

But we're expecting that things will change.  That much is certain.  The question is...

How fast?

Are my expectations for immediate universal health care, a non-imperialist foreign policy, serious alternative energy initiatives and the dismantling of the military industrial complex too much to hope for? 

Probably.

A more apt question might be does this moment, this death knell for Reaganomics precipitate disaster (as my conservative friends would have me believe) or does it precipitate a new era of peace and prosperity for the middle class?

Will it be kinda like the 50's only without the the ass-backwards social mores?

I hope it will.  I think we all do.  Even Joe the Plumber.

But I do also believe that I and my left of center friends are in for some frustrating times.

Because we're not gonna get all we want when we want it.  It doesn't work like that.

The ship of state turns around like a giant cruise-liner.  You can't feel it, you have to look at the horizon to even know you're turning.

Because (other than the Civil War and the American Revolution) change is always incremental.

So I urge patience.  Patience to all.

As the Reverend King said, "... the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice."

Look where we were at the beginning of the 20th century in regards to segregation, worker's rights, women's rights (they couldn't even vote), child labor laws, etc. and so on in a never ending list of things that would seem repulsive and obviously wrong to us today.

We have indeed made great strides, both moral, technological and financial in the last 108 years.

Yet...

We live at a time of great peril.  Peril of our own making.  We use too much of the World's natural resources.  We have embraced corporate fascism and all the low-low price bargains it can bring.  We have outsourced our entire manufacturing sector and are enjoying the fruits of de facto off-shore slavery.

We make nothing.  We consume everything.

Yet if we are willing to embrace a few changes we can save this Nation from self-immolation. We need humility.  We need compassion for our fellow countrymen.  We need to pour every resource and tool we have into educating the next generation of Americans.  We need our corporations to be patriotic in their decision making, whether it be the decision to keep jobs here, or the decision to treat employees fairly and reward the dignity of work with a living wage.

Most of all we need to become a self-sufficient republic, not the imperialist, expansionist world police force we believe ourselves to be.

That last sentence is especially important.  Because if we want to heal the World we could not do much better than to follow the advice of Jesus who said quite succinctly, "Physician heal thyself."

I hope we do heal. 

But I know that it takes time.  I know some of you will give up.

I won't.  I'm in this for the long haul, watching the horizon slowly drift past.  

Join me on the deck, won't you?