by Frank James
Peggy Noonan has a way of capturing the zeitgeist. She does it again in her latest wsj.com column in which she describes what the nation has just experienced with the inauguration of President Barack Obama and what it means:
Every time a nation does something big, the members of that nation who are 4 feet tall--the children who are 10 and 12--are looking up and absorbing. Forty years ago, in 1968, that grim and even-grimmer-in-retrospect year of war protests, race riots, taunts and assassinations, our 4-foot-tall citizens would have been justified in thinking that America is a scary place marked by considerable unhappiness and injustice. But the past week they could look up and see either harmony and happiness or peaceful acceptance and resolve. Washington was a town full of families and full of kids this week, and they must have picked up this: Anything is possible in America. We decide to go to the moon and soon it's "Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed." We decide to cure polio and soon it's a nation of Wilma Rudolphs, running. We struggle over civil rights and then the young black man raises his hand and says "I, Barack Hussein Obama . . ." We so rock. That's what 4-foot-tall Americans must have learned this week. A generation that will come to adulthood in 2020 and 2030 and has in their heads this sense of optimism and America-love will likely be stronger for it. It augurs well.
Noonan so rocks. She is so right. I'm a Boomer who remembers walking the streets of the Bronx as a kid after the King and Kennedy assassinations wondering if the world was coming to an end.
But because of what happened this week, our children's sense of what's possible will be bigger than ours at a similar age. That's definitely the kind of change we need.
(Photo: by Meet the Press via Getty)
Comments
Frank and Peggy are so right on with this, and it is sad that much of white America does not get this point. Anyone that posts agains this article just completely does not get it.
Posted by: Xcellentform | January 23, 2009 1:03 PM
"In 2004, George W. Bush continued dividing America with his divisive policies by divisively winning the election with 50.7 per cent of the vote. In 2008, Barack Obama united the entire world in a unifying spirit of unity by winning with 52.9 per cent of the vote.
That 2.2 per cent makes a massive difference, apparently. What the media actually means with all this talk of Obama uniting everybody is that a majority of voters finally supported the media’s candidate; you can feel the unity in every US newsroom, from the New York Times to the Chicago Tribune."
(from Tim Blair's blog)
Hope and Change, Baby. Feel the love! We're all in this together now! Blair so rocks!
Posted by: "Dissent is Patriotic" | January 23, 2009 2:32 PM
Who is she trying to kid, her boss, Ronnie Reagan. America rocks !! The only rocks she was throwing, along with all them other Republicans, when The Great Appeaser was spouting, the Government's the enemy, were rocks directed at the underprivileged, the marginalized !! All of a sudden, she's for the downtrodden. Give me a break !! Go back to writing that right wing propaganda, you were more believable, then !!
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, BRING THEM HOME, ALIVE AND WHOLE. NOW.
Posted by: Don Fitzgerald, Chicago | January 23, 2009 2:51 PM
Xcellentform, I don't think that the point is about white America, or black America, or sky-blue-pink-with-orange-stripes America. It's about us, and on Tuesday we did it again. We've had 43 orderly transfers of executive power since the first one in 1797. This time, we had two candidates with notable differences; the defeated one went back to being a senator, and his running mate went back to being a governor. The previous incumbent president walked out of the lower level of the Capitol to the waiting Marine helicopter, and went home, defying predictions by many of his haters that he would suspend the elections, declare martial law, or similar bushwa to keep himself in office. Even when the incumbent is defeated for reelection, that's what he does.
Compare that with the Soviet Union, which never had an orderly transfer of power, or communist China, or Zimbabwe.
I watched as much of the inauguration as I could; I was traveling that day. My recurring impression was, "Osama bin Laden, try to defeat this!" The state of the Union is strong.
We so rock.
Posted by: DaveB | January 23, 2009 6:10 PM
Forty years ago I was 1A in draft and my life went from the American dream to the American nightmare all because of the great Democrat LBJ. Now we have another war only all the Dems. who approved it suddenly found it politically incorrect and give us some BS that "I support the troops but not the war" or believe we should fight this war on terror with utopian ideals that do not jive what war is and means. Our children grow up watching Mickey Mouse, theirs grow up watching jihad mouse. Nice touching story, if our enemies perceive us as fools and weak these 4 footers may grow up to another nightmare. Don't forget to tell your children to support the Obama "surge" in Afghan, Bush is gone.
Posted by: Bubba Porter | January 23, 2009 8:54 PM
I read Noonan's article and I wondered if she had read my blog post on Jan 20 - 40 years ago to the day Nixon was inaugurated. 1969 brought us the Days of Rage, Mai Lai, Neil Armstrong on the moon, riots, marches, Fred Hampton assassinated in his bed - quite a year - and yes, at 10 years old I was afraid to grow up. At fifty, the challenges my children face are different than the ones that I looked at it 1969. No less scary, but today there is a different kind of leadership in place.
Posted by: tabor330 | January 24, 2009 10:35 AM
Oh, Peggy, speechwriter of Ronald Reagan, who RUINED this country and laid the ground for the hatred that was Bush I , 'The Gingrich (stolen vote) Revolution' and Bush II--SHUT UP. Just shut up.
Posted by: How can you quote this woman | January 24, 2009 10:42 AM
Most all of us want Obama to succeed. Because if he succeeds, we all succeed. We need this after eight years of the Bush/Cheney destruction and depletion. I agree with Peggy Noonan on this one, yet still wonder if she will ever get over herself?
Posted by: Vivian | January 25, 2009 12:00 PM
Noonan is as racist as the rest of the Left. Obama is biracial, he is not "black".
Unless, that is, you subscibe to the racist notion the "one drop of black blood" makes on 100% black. Apparently Noonan does.
-IK
Posted by: Ignatz K. | January 27, 2009 9:41 AM