The Rhyming of Hope and History

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

Excerpt from The Cure at Troy, by Seamus Heaney

Barack Obama, the community organizer, has done his job well. He's organized this nation into a community of hope at a crucial historical moment.

He's given poetry confirmation in the real world, and against all odds has earned the right to govern like no other politician anybody's ever seen.

The audacity of hope notwithstanding, we are surrounded by the threat of a triple catastrophe: an economic crisis, an energy crisis, and a climate crisis. We will not escape unscathed. We have yet to hit bottom. Yet there will eventually be a collective blessing, for catastrophe is also opportunity.

These last eight years have been nasty, brutish and long. We have been led down a spiralling pathway of business-and-politics-as-usual by a President who swaggered to a press conference to proclaim he'd be spending the political capital his re-election provided. He squandered every last farthing and more. The Greeks never portrayed hubris and its consequences so pathetically.

Hope now provides political capital of a different coin. It cannot be spent -- for it springs eternal. It does its work not by trickling down but by sharing its power to uplift. It is the antidote to cynicism and the denial of science, of human rights, of equal opportunity, and of common decency which America has endured. Even 9/11itself was hijacked to serve a vengeful national narrative.

Yet not since that terrible day -- I heard Oprah say on TV tonight -- has the country been so brought together. It's time for healing and redemption, but it's not up to Barack Obama to provide them. It's up to the communities he's organized into a new nation.

There are solutions at hand that will sustain this country and the world -- beyond next quarter's earnings report -- far into the future of this now imperiled globe. The solutions to the climate crisis are the same solutions that will revive our economic life; they are the same solutions that will establish a new and clean energy order. The threat of triple catastrophe can be met with unitary purpose.

It's time to chase the rats from the marketplace with a mighty and visible hand and reclaim the earth for the purpose of life.

Hooray!

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