May it all come true....

As I said yesterday commenting on numerous other blogs, we spent all day yesterday glued to the TV watching history being made. (If presidential inaugurations would be re-scheduled for the spring instead of the dead of winter, the thought of camping out on the Mall for a front-row seat would have been more appealing!) For a white Virginian who remembers the civil rights movement if the 1960s with both pain and pride, the inauguration of an African-American whom so much of the country could get behind was a promise fulfilled. Not, I hasten to add, a promise of the movement, but a promise of our country, which that movement forced us to acknowledge. We are finally living up to the ideals written into our founding documents. For that reason alone we can hold our heads high among other nations. For all our faults, we got this one right.

So yesterday was a time of justifiable pride. But it also signaled, for most of us, a time of enormous relief, and we can only hope in the long run that will be justified, too. For now, it appears the extremists who highjacked our national discourse for so long are in retreat. With the leadership of this extraordinary man, Barack Obama, and with our own diligence, may the unreasoned voices of extremism remain muted and may they become irrelevant. This crazy-quilt collection of disparate groups we call America, this experiment, can only succeed with understanding of and respect for our differences. If everyone is "right," no one can be.

"Hubris" is a word with which we've become all too familiar over the past eight years. Let's put it back in the dictionary of seldom-used terms where it belongs and replace it with another. It's from the same book. Tolerance.