Day One, Year One

Many have come to our nation's capital to protest wars and injustice. Today the largest number of people ever to gather in Washington DC comes to welcome, toast, and support Barack Obama and all that he and his new Administration stand for.

Today's assembly braces against sub-freezing temperatures that match the absence of warmth, generosity, and American goodness left by the outgoing regime. Ironically its chief henchman, no friend of people with disabilities, will appear in a wheelchair. It's as if the oncoming good spirit of the gathering has served up some sort of poetic justice for his unabashed legacy of disability.

The in-pouring of hope we see in the faces of the American people today expresses their determination to bring the American spirit back to America. That wholesome determination is washing like a tsunami over the stench and stain the former regime—built on greed and pettiness, led by a profoundly stupid man, a puppet of evilly greedy men.

People from every corner of the world recognize our eight-year failure. Yet once again they are about to forgive us. They are with us now, just as they were immediately after 9/11. Their good faith will not be squandered this time. We are starting over.

When thinking of starting over, it occurs to me how purely arbitrarily we number our years. We still count from the purported birth of a Messiah of one, dominant religion among our thousand faiths. Somewhat less arbitrarily we divide our numbers by tens and come up with centuries.

So to accept that the current millennium began with the Supreme Court appointment of our nation's most corrupt and un-American regime—one bent on bullying its way around the world—is not only ill-founded, it's discouraging and counter-productive. We don't have to accept it.

Why not start over, not just with our efforts but with our calendar? Why not mark this new beginning with an appropriately fresh way to number our days? Well, because that would be arrogantly self-congratulatory. We're over that. More to the point, we have yet to prove we can create an America worth calling new. That's for history to decide.

Besides, we and our new Administration have many and much more pressing issues to address. All of us have to pitch in and make things better before we deserve such a distinction. But there's nothing wrong with setting a new calendar as one of the ways we might measure our success.

Can we make this point forward so worthy of note that one day it will be called Day One of the Year One?

Labels: America, Barack Obama, calendar