Tomorrow will mark a new remarkable beginning and renewal in the history of our country with the inauguration of Barack Obama, our first African American president.
Beyond the historical significance of Obama's rise, it will also mark an end to the divisiveness, political ideology and rhetoric that has taken this country to the brink of disaster. The Bush Years are over. Thank God. Now, we can all take a collective sigh of relief while realizing the tough road ahead as Obama indicated yesterday at his inauguration concert.
Obama faces a daunting job of reviving a collapsing economy (worst since the Great Depression), ending the war in Iraq, restoring our tattered reputation around the world and restoring dignity and respect to the office of the presidency. Yet Obama is the right man at the right time to help us overcome this bleak economy and bring this country together after so many years of partisanship and divisiveness.
He's already started to move past recent crippling ideology in his cabinet selections and with his willingness to reach out to Republicans in Congress as he readies his agenda to turn the country around.
Here's a poem I wrote a few years ago about what I think about the perils of ideology. I am very hopeful that Obama and his team will avoid the ideological dead ends and battles the Bush Administration so reveled in.
GP
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LIFE IS TOO BIG FOR IDEOLOGY
Life is too big for empty ideology.
Spirit robbing
bureaucrats
think they know what is in our hearts.
I've never known an ism,
a breathing ideology
or a racial slur.
Just human beings
frail,
broken,
feisty,
hoping,
yearning
and fighting
for some space
and peace of mind.
It is something no ideology
ever conceived
can seem to provide.
George Pappas
Copyright 2009
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