Hasslington's Notes On The Final Day Of The 2008 Democratic National Convention

"We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations far away. We have learned that we must live as men, not as ostriches, not as dogs in the manger.

"We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community.

"We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that 'The only way to have a friend is to be one.'"

--Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Inauguration Day; January 20, 1945)

THURSDAY, AUGUST 28

Al Gore used to seem like someone who could have been (and probably should have been) the President of the United States. Listening to him speak tonight, however, I got the strange sense that he indeed is our current president, and it's just that we American citizens, through an odd and relatively sad twist of fate, somehow accidentally and collectively slipped through a galactic wormhole a few presidential elections ago that forced us into a more fraught and intellectually lazy alternate universe. As a result of this odd occurrence, George W. Bush became president. In this context, Mr. Gore tonight reminded us that in America--the real America, wherever it might be at present--things are fine because America has done what it normally does in that it has adapted well to a changing world, and, after seven-plus years of wandering in a sort of wilderness, its people will finally have the opportunity to choose whether or not to step back into that better reality this November.

Obviously, the above paragraph was metaphorical in nature, and some of it was exaggerated in order to make a point. But I am not being metaphorical or facetious when I suggest that later in the evening, a younger, inspiring gentleman of mixed ethnicity took to the stage for just under an hour and sounded a lot like a strong future president. I don't think I need to mention his name for most folks to know to whom I'm referring.

I will mention, however, that yet another gentleman of another era from another country, Mr. Winston Churchill (whose mother was an American), once suggested that what makes the United States so singularly unique is that unlike most other places "...America always eventually gets it right." The two questions this begs is when that "eventually" will happen and what form it will take. One way or the other, given our national government's current chief executive team, the vast majority of us can surely agree that we don't have it right at the moment. In fact, we don't have it right by a long shot.