Obama - Riding on the Wings of Change

Riding on the Wings of Change

by Amy Dickinson

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

As an advice columnist, I make my living drilling into the heart of other people's problems. As such, I have a very complicated relationship with the notion of change.

Change is the beautiful and elusive Nicole Kidman of transitional states: virtually all of us would love to embrace change even while it seems chronically out of reach.

I'm a skeptic when it comes to change, however. It's something we most often want others to do. This permits us to enjoy the benefits of transformation, while we as individuals stay the same.

In my experience studying the human condition, we only change when there is no alternative. And now, there is no alternative.

Our national challenges trickle down into our households. We have family members at war, our jobs aren't secure, our retirement savings seem to be disappearing and our material lifestyle is under assault.

The domestic challenges that individuals face are reflected in the letters to my column; my readers write to me about tension between family members when their 25-year old unemployed college graduates move back into their old bedrooms or when they can no longer afford eldercare for their parents.

This election season was the longest and ugliest in my memory. In my neighborhood, there were pitched battles over yard signs and skirmishes over intractable political positions. But the day following Barack Obama's victory, the yard signs came down and the dissent seemed to dissipate and blow away in the wind like so much political convention confetti.

People want to go back to that time when they felt most hopeful, and I don't blame them, because I feel the same way.

When Barack Obama offered to be a transformative agent of change, I met the notion with my usual degree of skepticism. There is a limit to what any professional politician can achieve when the change that really needs to happen must reach all the way into our individual lives.

But our new president is offering us more than the promise of change. With his historic election, he offered us the optimistic idea that we can do what we must do.

Emily Dickinson called hope "the thing with feathers." Change is lofted on hope's wings.

We have a new president. He has ushered in a new era and is facing a historical imperative, because change is now inevitable. It must come. And now we are blessed with its beautiful precursorwe have hope.

Our new president is offering us more than the promise of change. With his historic election, he offered us the optimistic idea that we can do what we must do.

Amy Dickinson's memoir, "The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, a Daughter and the Town that Raised Them" (Hyperion), will be published in February. Send questions to askamy@tribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc

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