Looking Around

"Change we can believe in" is what we all want now, but the reality is entangled in everyone thinking and doing just what they are accustomed to do (and no more!), and change can go hang. It's going to take rock-solid leadership to get people to work together, for one another.

What the country really needs--what we need--is the courage to lead ourselves. We have dreams and hopes that are stunted and shunted aside, by the forces of inertia both around and within us; we know they are there, crying to get out. We may even see another person, here and there, expressing what we would do ourselves if we could only see the way. We think of the angles, the risks, the seemingly inevitable bruises or worse we would be asking for, and we decline. We can't do it now, we say. We have to wait for a better time, a decent chance. Only the chance never comes.

We have to make our own chance for ourselves. We have to stand forth, out in the fierce rain of public ridicule and near-universal dismissal. We have to show ourselves, and one another, it can be done.