Jan 19, 2009
When Reagan announced it was “morning in American again,” midway through his disastrous presidency, most of us knew even then that we had ventured into an era of unprecedented inequality, fiscal irresponsibility (he doubled the national debt), and criminality from our elected officials (google iran-contra).

We didn’t know it was the beginning of 30 years of mismanagement in high places, reckless deregulation, multiple assaults upon our Constitution, and runaway spending that would see the national debt increase tenfold.¹

We didn’t know it would bring us to this Inauguration Eve on the brink of another global Great Depression.

We didn’t know the alliance of neoconservativism, religious fundamentalism, and a military-industrial complex that has conquered the world would leave our nation’s reputation in tatters, the world consumed in a frenzy of bloodshed, and a nation top-heavy with a few multi-billionaires lording it over 300 million increasingly impoverished, unhealthy, ill-educated, and desperate Americans.

Tomorrow, two roads diverge in that yellow wood.² One, the main-travelled road, is the way blazed by Alexander, the Caesars, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler—men who would dominate the world by flame and sword, who knew only death, who had no drop of humanity flowing through their cold, bloodless, grasping veins.

The other, the road less traveled, the road of love and of life, is the way blazed by Christ, the Enlightenment, Gandhi, and King. It is the road of human potential, it is the road that speaks to our better selves, the selves in awe of the majesty of life, of its infinite delights, of its tragic brevity.

Tomorrow, as a people of a once and (potentially) future great nation, we will choose one of those roads, and we will travel it together for many days to come. And though we think we may keep the first for another day, and though the choice may, indeed, come back to us again, one day it will not, and on that day the road we are on will be the road on which we will stay to the end, be it bitter or triumphant. We would be wise to live as if tomorrow is that day.
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¹ United States National Debt: An Analysis of the Presidents Who Are Reponsible for the Borrowing, by Steve McGourty, accessed January 10, 2009
² The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost, from Bartleby.com (Accessed January 13, 2009)
tags: Governance