Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Moving on

Yesterday seemed like a day to rival Palm Sunday itself as Obama supporters filled Washington DC to welcome him to power. Instead of palm branches people carried American flags emblazoned (illegally) with Obama's face. Network television and radio was wall to wall Obama and it was very hard to avoid the coverage of his every move. I don't intend to pop anyone's euphoric balloon but let's remember that the Jews were quickly disappointed when Jesus wasn't the political figure they expected to throw off the Roman oppressors. It took less than a week for the tables to turn.

My prayer yesterday was that the man wouldn't be the victim of a nut job with a gun or worse...a rocket launched into the crowd. I'm thankful he survived the day. I would be foolish not to continue to pray for his ability to listen to and follow wise council as he leads our nation. He's got the job now...time to put the pedal to the metal, as they say.

Now that we've celebrated Obama's skin color...do we now have permission to move on to examining the content of his character, his cabinet, his policies?


Photo Credit: AP via Yahoo

2 comments:

LissaKay said...

I still cringe at the notion of comparing Obama to our Lord, Jesus Christ. Sacrilege! I do see that you are just relaying the mood of those who put him in office, and the comparison is more of the crowds that met Jesus on his arrival in Jerusalem. There the similarities end.

Neither to I care for the comparisons some have made of Obama to the antichrist. I would not elevate Obama even to those heights. He is, quite simply, a young, inexperienced, power-hungry, self-absorbed man from the corrupt Chicago political machine with radical ideologies that could prove to be quite dangerous to the well-being of the United States and perhaps the entire world. But it is difficult to say what he is going to do that is so bad, since he isn't telling us, at least not a straight story that he will stick to.

This administration will need the closest of scrutiny and willingness of action by those who truly care about the future of this nation. All of those "powers" that Bush "grabbed" for himself, albeit for the safety of the country, which we weren't so comfortable with in principle, could prove to be very dangerous in the hands of a radical president with much less integrity and more concern for his political well-being than the security of the nation.

I hope and pray that I am very wrong about Obama, but I am just as afraid that I am not. God help us all.

N.S. Allen said...

This brings to mind something that happened to me, recently.

I was sitting in the local dining hall - it was either on the day of the inauguration or the day after - listening to my dorm's House Council President talk, while I ate. Now, he happens to be one of the House's resident Republicans, and the discussion had, by a very circuitous route, turned to the topic of the inauguration.

Needless to say, he started to go on about how annoying he found all the fanfare, from which he worked around to how support for Obama had just been a "bandwagon," how he thought all the hubbub about his race was excessive and wrong-headed, and how his supporters weren't paying attention to any of the issues.

Well, as I was listening, it sort of struck me that, here we were, listening to someone complain about how everyone's only focusing on the superficial aspect of things...when, if he had, for one second, tried to bring up a serious issue that Obama has taken a stance on, the people paying attention to him would have listened just as willingly, if not moreso. The discourse, which was civil and casual to begin with, wouldn't have suddenly spiralled out of existence.

But, instead, he talked about all the superficial, unimportant things that...he wishes people wouldn't talk about. There's some irony in that, to say the least.

It just seems like people who want our political discourse to be more serious and policy-oriented would make more of an impression if they practiced what they preached. Instead, they always just seem to talk about how everyone else isn't talking like they want them to.