We are the agents of change that we have been waiting for

As I made breakfast this morning, hundreds of miles from DC, preliminary NPR coverage of folks gathering for inauguration festivities this afternoon started to make me a little fizzy.  In fact, I popped upstairs to turn on CNN to see live images of people collected near the Capitol, on the Mall, and along the parade route.  The sea of humanity was impressive--like what we experienced at the Thanksgiving parade off Times Square in November, but with that extra....fizz?  This triggered a recurring conversation my wife and I have had about our hopes (or lack thereof) for change with the Obama administration.

My wife L identifies herself variously as an optimistic pessimist, a pessimistic optimist, and a realist--I'm pretty much a manic optimist, but prone to crashing into sullen pessimism on occasion.  We were both excited to move to an ostensibly liberal Massachusetts in 2006, only to find ourselves in a pretty conservative pocket of the state (libraries?!  we don't need no stinking libraries!).  Further, Obama's yes we can echoes our Gov. Patrick's together we can--yet we still can't manage to keep professors from working without a contract this year, with no end in sight (and scant hope any retroactive COLA increases).

After my verbalized, coffee-induced daydream about driving to DC this morning, L noted that she wished she was more excited, but after the rise and fall of hopes under Patrick, she's just not on fire like folks you hear interviewed on the Mall.  I understand her--today is symbolic, but it's not merely symbolic.  (In fact, as my semiotic-grappling COMM 229 students will attest, nothing is merely symbolic.)  Symbols matter, and the swearing-in ceremony for our nation's first first black president is an important symbol for our country.  Hearing an NPR report from Montgomery, AL, where a convention center blocks away from where water cannons were used on civil rights protesters in the 1960s is set to host thousands of people for the inauguration, brought that home again this morning.

Another way in which this symbolism matters is in terms of the peaceful transferral of power from one party to another.  This is something that as Americans we might take for granted--but we shouldn't.  Consider the recent Russian elections, where Medvedev is now president, but it's pretty clearly understood that Putin is running the show.  (Of ourse, we had Cheney behind Bush, which only underscores the importance of today's symbolic moment all the more, right?)

Further, for the last decade, internal opposition in Russia, much less any attempt at providing an objective (journalistic) voice within the country, has been literally shot dead in its tracks.

The latest proof: today's New York Times article about another political assassination in Russia.  This time it was a human rights lawyer and a journalist.  The lawyer, Stanislav Markelov (34), described by the Times as having "spent the better part of a decade pursuing contentious human rights and social justice cases," had been fighting the early release of a Russian tank commander accused of murdering a young Georgian woman.  The journalist, Anastasia Baburova (25), wrote for the government-critical Novaya Gazeta newspaper, and is the fourth journalist from the paper to have been killed since 2000.  The most notable of those four, of course, was Anna Politkovskaya (murdered on Putin's birthday in 2006), whose last book Putin's Russia is a heartbreaking and alarming must-read.

So let us give thanks.  Today is an important day.  We should rejoice for any number of reasons.  But we should also be ready to roll up our sleeves tomorrow.  In reading Sarah Susanka's The Not So Big Life, L came across a quote from Ghandi this weekend that was particularly poignant to us, and that I leave you with:

We must be the change we wish to see in the world.