TRIAL OF A NATION

As I write these lines, it is four a.m. on the morning of what will probably be remembered as either the day Americans turned the corner and lived up to the passion and prayers of the Founding Fathers or chose instead to go the way of other empires which vanished for no other reason than the greed of their citizens and the self-serving enabling of the government which allegedly served them.

To me, this is about more than electing a president whose ancestors were both brought over here in chains and made that hellish voyage possible in the first place. In our rush to celebrate our racial enlightenment, I think we forget that Barack Obama is also white. He is, in a larger sense, the hybrid alluded to by the term melting pot. He is the product of the forge and the crucible; the legacy of Nate Thomas and Simon Legree; Gettysburg and the Reconstruction; the Ku Klux Clan and the Congress of Racial Equality; Dr. Martin Luther King and Governor George Wallace.

He exemplifies a new generation of Americans, born and raised to believe that all things are possible it one refuses to envision anything except success. He understands perhaps better than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the need for cooperation and consensus. He is far more a statesman than a politician; far more a facilitator than a charismatic leader; far more a walker than a talker, despite an eloquence which springs from the heart and the mind across one tongue and a language common to every single citizen he has pledged to serve.

He represents the best that is in each of us and he is vulnerable to the raging beast that co-exists in the often convoluted and contradictory character of the nation itself. He has willingly admitted that he cannot do the job without us; that his solutions depend on the willingness of each of us to participate in the process. He is not a benevolent genius ordained by God to lead his people out of the self-imposed bondage of material greed. He is much simpler than that. He is an American who understands what it is to be one.

Regardless of whether his plans for economic salvation succeed or fail; regardless of whether his foreign policy returns this nation to a place of honor and respect among all nations; whether his fireside chats reach the Blackberries and the laptops of his constituency here and around the globe, Barack Obama himself will not pale before the promises he has made, for no single individual is mighty enough to let an entire nation down.

If we end up sinking into the mire of abysmal economics and sealing our own extinction, it will not be because Barack Obama failed. It will be because we, as individual citizens of the noblest social experiment in history, chose to do so. And we will have no one to blame but ourselves.