Color My World

Listening to Barack Obama’s inaugural address yesterday, I was not surprised to be impressed and satisfied, challenged and hopeful. It conveyed his affirmation of commitment to the life that we all will create together. It defined the relationship into which we were entering in a ceremony that amounted to the marriage of our vast citizenry to its chosen groom.

Very slowly, over several months, this now-president has challenged my abandonment of wanting any kind of leader, by proposing a contract of mutual respect that his speech on Tuesday served to finalize. I was not surprised that his message was an intelligent, relational, and genuine one, rather than an indoctrinating train of misplaced logic based on foregone agreements arrogantly assumed.

Still there was for me, midway through the speech, a surprise. By listing together, in one sweeping series, those who "for us ... toiled in sweatshops, and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip, and plowed the hard earth," he merged histories that even my generally egalitarian mind had held separate—of black and white, theirs and ours—into the shared journey of one people.

What met me as something unexpected was not the approach he took or the topics he visited, but instead a message of true community that transcended even his eloquent prose to effect a subtle reframing of my mind.