1/23/09: It's time to add hope to our history

This week has been unprecedented. The news has been full of analysis of the inauguration, from how much money was spent on it (an unprecedented amount), how many celebratory balls the Obamas went to (an unprecedented number), how many people gathered in D.C. to participate (unprecedented crowds of them) and how great it is that America has finally elected a leader who is a person of color.

I like talking about things in this way, and I hope we keep it up.

I like it because before the newness of this inauguration, news cycles were full of accounts of an impending economic depression — “the second Great Depression,” I’d heard it called — and how the bailout would still be affecting us generations from now.

Before Obama even became president-elect, too, he was being compared to President Kennedy, and an Obama White House was being touted as a “return to Camelot.” Some of my friends, citing the fresh-faced young family’s similarities to the Kennedys, expressed concern for Obama’s safety, in the kind of hushed tones reserved for talking about things you’re afraid to say aloud in case it would somehow cause them to happen.

There’s a certain kind of adrenaline created by all that talk, especially when it links us now to memories of past traumas still shocking and dire enough to warrant moments of silent reflection.

But that kind of agitation is nothing compared with the adrenaline of moving forward, and that’s what I want to focus on. In fact, what I want most to say here is that we all should.

Our times are unprecedented. We can learn a lot from the past, and I hope we do: Saving money and learning to live within our means, as modest as they may be in this economy, are lessons we can glean from the 1930s. I, for one, have learned to cook turnips and make my own marmalade.

As loath as I am to suggest that anything “good” could come from the national trauma of the assassination of our president in 1963, I hope even the most extreme protestors learned that proper, democratic dissent can’t be handled by a gun or any violent solution. It can only be productively expressed in words and through legal, peaceful means.

But we’re not living in the Great Depression. We’re not living in the Cold War. Our lives now are so significantly different that we couldn’t have predicted what we’d be doing or caring about now even 20 years ago. Even 10 years ago, most of us would not have guessed we’d be where we are today.

We’re living in a country with people willing to participate in more than 12,000 service projects in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Barack Obama’s call to service, for one thing.

I have to admit that I have a soft spot for service projects; I spent two years in Washington, D.C., as a full-time Americorps volunteer, and loved it enough to be seriously tempted by the possibility of visiting for this week’s inauguration. My time in D.C., and as a volunteer, taught me that a lot can get done with a bit of optimism and elbow grease.

I’m not saying that I think that “the power of positive thinking” will magically save us from the need to right our economic situation any more than I think the King Day of Service will eliminate the need for social programs.

But these days require out-of-the-history-book thinking. Hope needs to be taken into account when we’re talking about the future.I think we’ll find our accounts are better off than we thought.