Thoughts for my skeptical friends

The only reason to be disappointed that a president is not a perfectly flawless messianic figure is if you originally held the mistaken belief that any president could ever be a perfectly flawless messianic figure.

The only reason to remind me that a president will not be a perfectly flawless messianic figure is if you think I originally held the mistaken belief that any president could ever be a perfectly flawless messianic figure. You needn't, for I didn't.

If we both accept the fact that no president ever could be a perfectly flawless messianic figure, it makes little sense to express disappointment or to "temper your enthusiasm" based on the insufficiently leftist leanings of, say, a particular president-elect. Knowing that no real president can fully embody your platonic ideal, you know that yours will always be the task of an activist. You will always be working to push and pull and insist and cajole the powers-that-be into making the decisions and taking the actions that bring the world closer to your vision. This is the case whether the president were a moderate Democrat or a radical Socialist.

This is not a bad thing! This is forever our task and our fight and our very mission in life. Why look so disappointed when you say, "We'll just have to keep holding his feet to the fire?" If that's our task in any case, why not take a moment to rejoice that the feet will now belong to someone more thoughtful, gracious, and sincere than his predecessor? If our task will never be done, we rejoice that for a moment that parts of it may become a bit less arduous. We rejoice that the feet belong to someone who at least speaks to ideals of oneness and equality. We rejoice that the feet belong to someone who finds it important to make his core message the notion that there is now no male nor female, slave nor free, gay nor straight, red nor blue...

Maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe, like you said, you've just had your heart broken too many times. You've watched too many charismatic leaders killed or co-opted, and you can't muster up the excitement one more time. From your perspective, after many broken love affairs, we revelers seem foolish and naive, entirely too optimistic and unaware of the hard work that lies ahead of us. But warnings from elders about broken hearts has never stopped young people from falling in love. This is our first real taste of it, and it's glorious. We're excited by these heady beginnings and these wonderful new feelings, true, but we're also energized by the sense of potential ahead of us. We feel like nothing is impossible; we feel willing to pour our lives into the work our love demands. So we have laughed, and cried, and danced, and drawn accusations of messianic fervor when--for almost the first time in our lives--we have refused a sneering cynicism as our first resort.

We're no dummies, really. This love will be hard work. We know. But we want to do the hard work, because love is also beautiful and delicious and crazy and good.

Remember?