This is what I would like to do today.
And not just Obama, but the millions of Americans who voted for him, who dared to hope for something better and acted on it.
I no longer have to think of America as frightening, and of my friends who live there as besieged islands of reason and decency in a muddy sea of prejudice and religious fervour, where knowledge and science are silenced or exploited to support those prejudices and that fervour.
You're no longer a nation where education and books are frowned upon, where climate change can be edited out of reports and out of your leaders' lists of responsibilities with a pen stroke, and where truth is not based on facts, but something you 'feel in your gut'.
No longer.
I understand you today, America. For the first time in many years, I feel like I know you.
And that is worth one huge, intercontinental megahug.
2 comments:
And we hug you right back. I am so excited I can hardly sit still. I think we will go to Washington for the Inauguration in January. It will give me great peace to read the inscription on the Lincoln Memorial* while listening to another "skinny guy from Illinois" addressing the people for whom HE saved the union.
* "In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever."
*big smiles*
One too many glasses of champagne last night. It's raining and I'm slightly hung-over but happy :-)
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