© Bess Greenberg

© Bess Greenberg

Back in 1995 a distinguished committee of colleagues and I, perhaps presumptuously, determined to define and rank the basic elements of democracy—in preparation for a handbook we were working on. Though the list contained the obvious essentials, like the rule of law, freedom of the press, and the rights and responsibilities of citizens, we ranked first “trust, goodwill and idealism.” I would be more succinct now and simply call that first imperative hope.  

        
President- elect Obama speaks of the audacity of hope—and I invite you to reflect on the necessity for hope-- in building, sustaining and, yes, healing a democratic society.  Acts of terrorism, more often than not, dependent on men and women willing to die for their cause, differ from democratic process dramatically—and tragically, because they are acts of hopelessness.  Hope ranges from cautious optimism to instrumental optimism to rose-colored-glasses optimism—maybe from the sublime to the ridiculous—or at least from the sensible to the naive.

I am in praise of and advocate for hope because it is a necessity for progressive change. It gives us the audacity to insist on the rule of law. We can only opt for this enlightened approach to governance because we hope and trust that our neighbors as well as we will obey the laws that are created by and for the people. We can only promote the free flow of ideas in the press and elsewhere because we trust that for the most part we will hear the truths and opinions of our very diverse population and we can endure and benefit from a very wide range of views.

Terrorism is the instrument of the hopeless and powerless. It requires a lot of ingenuity and yes, audacity, but it is at the same time, nihilism incarnate--killing for killing’s sake out of the despair generated by systems that have no place for citizens.  Citizens thrive and build societies that thrive by virtue of their law-given rights and responsibilities. There is no more effective way to make the changes that stretch a society, helping it to come closer to such ideals as “liberty and justice for all.”

The Obama presidency comes at the best and worst of times. Perhaps every generation finds itself in that Dickensian predicament. We Americans have taken an important step forward not only by electing our first African American president, but by electing a man of incomparable intelligence and integrity. And, at the same time, we find ourselves in our worst economic downturn since the great depression.  And so we are giving our new president a daunting challenge—with the hope that he will deliver us into an era of promise.

Obama brings hope to Americans and, indeed, to the world. We hope that the tragedies of the last decades, born of many factors, including the collapse of the old world order, which left us, in the words of philosopher Hannah Arendt, “between the no longer and the not yet,” will be replaced by an era of promise to all the world’s people. The candidate of change —the leader of promise—is the beginning of our “new hope”—a cautious optimism founded in our belief in democracy and in an extraordinary leader.

But that “new hope” will be to naught if it does not energize and inspire us to seize the moment by rededicating ourselves to what the late Justice Louis Brandeis termed the most important job in our democracy—that of the citizen. Obama has made it clear that the task ahead-- running this country and leading the world—is not a one man job. It is our job, Democracy is not about charismatic leaders alone—it is played out in the every day actions of people like us enjoying our rights as individuals and assuming the responsibilities of citizenship.

© Oliver Wasow

"The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States simply means that everything I could hope for as an African American woman of the boomer generation has been fulfilled and I can die happy."
--Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, Curator, Museum of Art and Design, New York

Obama's election means to me: that at last we have a president who speaks and acts as though he knows the importance of the concept of our "common good."  Common means addressing the specific interests of the public in relation each to the other, e.g. his speech of March 18, 2008 in which he defended the truth of African American suffering of injustice in our history but also the unjust suffering of white working-class Americans. Long ago, the social psychologist G.H. Mead said: "Democracy depends upon the ability of the voter, once inside the voting booth, to vote for someone else's interests in addition to their own." Also, my hope it that in Obama we will get loose from the superficial uses of the words "left" and "right" in describing policy alternatives, as well as "liberal" and "conservative."  We must get away from using all four of these words as abstractions which conceal human realities of  need and responsibility.  Common good also means the human common good worldwide. The new global world will not permit us to indulge in a facile politics which tosses off  "America first" as either a realistic or a moral stance towards our world neighbors.

Donald W. Shriver, Jr. is president emeritus of the Union Theological Seminary in New York