Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Four Years ago

The opening of Obama's speech last night had me going for a moment. Overall, it wasn't a great speech, in my completely unqualified opinion. But it had a great opening.
Each time we gather to inaugurate a president, we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution.  We affirm the promise of our democracy.  We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names.
Something fluttered inside me. This has been the sea change of this administration for me. All of a sudden, some very official government officials are talking about darker shades of beige and people for whom the god of the New Testament is not fundamental to their belief system and the beliefs of their ancestors as part of America.

It got me thinking about this moment 4 years ago. Friends of mine had gone to DC for the first inauguration. My partner and I were at a conference near my in-laws, where an unfortunate sequence of events caused us to realized that trying to adopt was just not going to work for us, we needed to try to conceive.....

It's been an eventful 4 years.

2 comments:

  1. Huh. Paying lip service to people of color is now progress, eh? The enduring strength of the constitution is that it's been consistently wrong and the enduring success of the american nation is just a testament to the fact that if you're an asshole willing to kill, exploit and discriminate against those not like you, you will be successful.

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  2. Given that even lip service was not paid 5 years ago... yes, it is progress. This is, admittedly, a sad state of affairs to be in. As for the rest? On a cynical day, one could say the same about any nation that has ever risen to power. But today is not a cynical day for me.

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