Four years ago, about a month before the presidential election, I took this picture of a sign hung above BBar and Grill at 4th and Bowery in New York. I posted it the next day to PWHNY with the title “Holiday Hope.” It was Columbus Day.
My post “Election Day Diary” from November 4, 2008 records our growing euphoria as the election results came in.
I’ve had my share of disappoints with Obama’s leadership over the past four years, but I still believe in him. So this morning, I remain full of hope, because shortly after landing on a dark and drizzly runway in Brussells, I was able to take this screenshot on my iPhone:
It’s a great feeling to have a president that you admire. Before Obama, I’d spent most of my adult life feeling ambivalent at best about US presidents, at worst full of disgust and embarrassment.
I was smiling this morning as I presented my passport to Belgian immigration.
My family came to this country beginning in 1637. Other branches filtered in over the next century. We married Indians, fought in the Revolution, fought the Civil War on both sides. First World War, Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf – we were there.
And now our country is practically gone. It is being replaced by a country in which our liberties will not exist because of utopian schemers, and our willingness to believe that we can get something for nothing.
Your country, and Obama’s, will collapse, just as surely as all Utopias eventually do.
But my country has been given away by fools who didn’t build it.
Your perceptions of what constitutes “building a country” and what constitutes “utopian” scheming are different from mine. Fighting wars strikes me as precisely the wrong conception of how to “build” a country. And the Puritans who arrived in the 1620s and 1630s strike many as the epitome of “utopian schemers.”