The promise of something better…

Sometimes, we need to be reminded of our better selves.

Sometimes, the light of nobility shines bright enough, pure enough, for all to see. That is often the purpose of art.

Remember this?

I loved this book as a child, and the film, because of Gregory Peck.

I loved clearly feeling the message, as one critic puts it, that “…most people are essentially kind ‘when you really see them.’ “

~~~

If you just read the words, simply substitute Cuba for Kenya, couldn’t Marco Rubio have uttered them?

And if spoken by Rubio, a Republican, wouldn’t they be embraced by most on the Right?

If you just read the words, read them out loud, savor them, really listen to them, they will move you, because I believe most of us want them to be true.

We need them to be true, even if we don’t like the guy who voiced them!

This is not about Party or even personality. It’s about finding our way forward rather than looking back, a waste of time and focus we can no longer afford.

We need to find a way, as ordinary people, to come together. To listen to the other side. To see the other perspective. To respect the other opinion.

To realize we, blessed to live here at this exact moment in time, are much stronger united than divided. And what unites us is so much greater than what divides us, as 9-11 proved, even if only briefly.

We can do this.

I still hope.

“Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire. What led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation. What led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause.”

“Hope is what led me here today. With a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas, and a story that could only happen in the United States of America.”

“Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is — who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.”

“This…is the message we can now carry…beyond. The same message we had when we were up and when we were down, the one that can change this country, brick by brick, block by block, calloused hand by calloused hand…that together, ordinary people can do extraordinary things.”

“Because we are not a collection of red states and blue states. We are the United States of America!”

~~ Barack Obama