This is our moment

More than a week ago, the eminent sociologist Robert Bellah posted a piece on the website The Immanent Frame looking ahead to the Obama presidency and stating that he believes the new president will work for the common good. The entire article, which is well worth reading can be found at: http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2009/01/12/this-is-our-moment-this-is-our-time/. Let me share the concluding paragraph with you.

Late in the campaign, McCain and Palin began calling Obama a socialist, because he believes in a progressive income tax. There is a deep irony here. Every normal modern nation has been influenced by democratic socialism. If that tradition has been weak in America, it, or something close to it (the New Deal and Social Security, which, like the progressive income tax, was also denounced as socialist), has never been entirely absent. Universal health care would put it on the agenda again, leading possibly to reform in our deeply unjust educational system and other areas as well. In the context of comparative modernity, democratic socialist equals normal. For the first time in a long time the possibility that we too could become normal, that we could better realize our good exceptionalism and avoid more of our bad exceptionalism, seems to have arrived. It will take a very grown up leader and massive public participation to make that happen. But as Obama has said so often, “This is our moment, this is our time.” I am glad to have lived long enough to see even such a possibility in this great but benighted nation.

Now that you have had a chance to hear or to read President Obama's inauguration address, do you have a greater sense of hope and possibility for the future of our nation than you did, say, 6 months ago? Are you also glad to have lived long enough to see this?