Election results bring hope and renewal

Public celebrations all across the world and tears of joy marked the culmination of a truly amazing presidential campaign on Nov. 4.

In significant measure, the historic election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States was an unprecedented grassroots effort, the kind we at SB CAN believe in and celebrate.

This grassroots effort has been at least four years in the making. In reflecting upon this momentous occasion, it's worth remembering that four years ago after the re-election of President George Bush, many of the same people who are now dancing in the streets were “mourning a sense of lost hope,” as I wrote then in a column for this newspaper.

In trying to make sense of that loss, I lamented that “maybe things have to get really, really bad” before people would realize we were heading in the wrong direction and be ready to turn things around:

“Maybe the budget deficit needs to quadruple and the trade deficit lead us toward bankruptcy,” I wrote, more prophetically than I realized. “Maybe more jobs need to be lost, more homeless fill our streets, more uninsured swamp our hospitals. ... Maybe the middle class needs to be squeezed into non-existence. Maybe we need to lose the America we love in order to really appreciate what we had, and fight to get her back.”

I struggled to find where we had gone wrong and how to get it right:

“Clearly, if people voted for Bush on moral issues, as the press then was concluding, progressives need to do a lot more work to articulate clearly and strongly our own moral platform. And clearly, people of faith need to do more soul-searching when prioritizing moral concerns. Since when do abortion, gay marriage and school prayer trump war, poverty, corporate greed, lost jobs and a failing health-care system as moral issues?”

As I wrote at the time, I found the inspiration I needed to stay engaged at an SB CAN monthly meet-up, where people like me “had struggled through their own grieving process and moved beyond despair and acceptance to hope and renewal.”

Clearly, the re-election of President Bush was “reinspiring progressives” to rediscover “what we really stand for, and how this vision of peace and prosperity can unite Americans in a way that Bush” was unable to achieve.

Maybe, I speculated, we needed four more years “to sift through the rubble of defeat and forge a newer, cleaner, higher platform of political ideals ... founded on clear moral values that all Americans can embrace.”

I ended the column with this hope:

“Maybe the stage is being set for the election in 2008, when a presidential candidate who embodies these ideals can reunite the nation, and restore our original greatness. The struggle for social and economic justice, for a clean and healthy environment, for a peaceful and prosperous world has never been easy. But the worthiness of our cause strengthens and nourishes us along the way. As Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote: ‘The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.'”

Truly, Barack Obama seems to embody the ideals we need today to reunite our nation. Four years of grassroots effort to redefine ourselves and articulate a vision of hope has led to this moment because, as he always insisted, the campaign was really about us.

But to ensure our success, we will need to remain fully engaged in the political process to support those we elected to lead us, and to hold them and ourselves accountable as we strive to fulfill our highest ideals as Americans.

Deborah Brasket is executive director of the Santa Barbara County Action Network (SB CAN). She can be reached at 722-5094, or Deborah@sbcan.org. Looking Forward runs every Friday, providing a progressive viewpoint on local issues.