This was the moment

I don’t watch television, but I almost wish I had caught this one live.  (What would I do without YouTube?)  I found two glorious nuggets in Barack Obama’s victory speech after the Iowa Caucus on Thursday night.  The first:

I’ll be a President who harnesses the ingenuity of farmers and scientists and entrepreneurs to free this nation from the tyranny of oil once and for all.  And I’ll be a President who ends this war in Iraq and finally brings our troops home, who restores our moral standing, who understands that 9/11 is not a way to scare up votes but a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the 21st century — common threats of terrorism and nuclear weapons, climate change and poverty, genocide and disease.

OK, so that probably qualifies as six or eight.  Wow!  A US presidential possibility talking about the tyranny of oil, the threats of nuclear weapons, climate change and poverty?  w00t!  Not surprising this dude won!  I hope he has excellent security around him because the KKK can’t be too happy about it.

Here’s the second shining nugget:

Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.  Hope is what I saw…Hope is what led me here today…

After he won the SK election in November 2007, Brad Wall shouted,  Hope beats fear! Hope beats fear!  I cringed when I heard that language.  Hope doesn’t beat anything.  It’s scientifically wrong.  And, there was certainly no evidence contrary to a definitive Sask Party win before the SK election in November.

Obama understands hope.  Hope is something we can have and hold.  We can dare to choose it.  We can choose to find the courage to work towards that for which we hope.  We can use that courage to make change in our personal and public lives.  Tommy Douglas knew about that, too.  It’s evident in his epitaph, Courage my Friends, ’tis not too late to make a better world.  I think Barak and Tommy would be buds were the times different.

I don’t know if Barack Obama is the right guy to lead the Democrats to victory.  My sense is he’s a good guy, a little less radical than I would want.  But he could pull the vote from where it’s never been pulled and the USA is long overdue for a black president.  Here’s his full victory speech, if you’re interested.

 

With thanks to that bastard logician with three t’s, mattt, for the nudge.