Gratitude Day #5

I decided to join Linda in a month of gratitude posts. I actually start and end my days with gratitude but it's kind of interesting and different to put things in writing.

Well, of course, I'm grateful that Barack Obama is president-elect, that this election is behind us and what feels to me like a more hopeful future lies ahead. I'm grateful that I live in a country where in the course of a very short span of time we could move the culture of our nation from one where we held black people as slaves to electing a black man as president. That is pretty awesome. We are a flawed nation (like all the others), but we are also a great nation. We lost our way for a while but I think we are on the road to not just an economic recovery - that's the least important aspect of the future - but a spiritual recovery. We have reclaimed our integrity.

In a smaller way, I'm grateful that I got one person I know to register for the first time in his life and to vote. I'm grateful that I got to hear the excitement in his voice that he had been part of something amazing and world changing. That was pretty cool.

I'm grateful for the bloggers (I won't list names because I'll forget someone and then I'll feel bad) who participated in discussion and debate over the past months. I'm even grateful for the people who disagreed with me but were willing to converse.

And I'm grateful to friends of mine and strangers who did what I can't do - who worked at the polling places, who campaigned and rang door bells and held gatherings in their homes, who did the leg work that got people interested and excited, who got people registered, who drove those who needed help to the polls.

I'm grateful that I live in a country where we have elections, where we have two parties. I think maybe we need to add some additional competition into that mix but that's a topic for another day.

One last think I'm grateful for. Eloquence. Some effort has been made to diminish Mr. Obama's eloquence as though eloquence is some kind of sham thing. Eloquence like Mr. Obama's, like Abraham Lincoln's, like Martin Luther King's... and like Mr. Obama's are powerful because they are eloquent not from the mouth, but from the heart. The power of Mr. Obama's speeches is not the words alone, but the brilliant mind and the heart that lies behind them. Mr. Obama is a man of peace to and from his core... and I mean peace in it's broadest sense, not just in the sense of ending wars, but in the sense of living from a place of love over hate. To quote him... he is a man who knows how "to disagree without being disagreeable." So I am grateful that he has the eloquence of words to reflect the eloquence of heart. I think he will be a healer for the nation and the world. That's a lot to put on one man's shoulders, but I think he can handle it.

And I've waxed wordy for long enough. You can now be grateful that I'm going to stop writing and post this.

One last thing. Tomorrow is the Blog Blast for Peace where bloggers from all over the world post under the banner of Dona Nobis Pacem. I hope you will all participate. Click on the banner below to find out more.