Andrew Sullivan on Obama's "we Are the ones we have been waiting for":
There's an element of messianic self-regard about the sentence. And I sure hope Obama doesn't get too cocky or begins to get carried away by the wave of support he has inspired.
But I think some have missed a nuance. The phrase is actually a self-indictment as well as a self-congratulation. The point is surely that we shouldn't wait for someone else to save us, or lift us up, or fix our problems or address our fate. We are the only ones who can do this. And we're responsible for our own failure. The sentence is actually a criticism of Obama's own supporters.What makes Obama's liberalism different from both the technocratic meliorism of the Clintons and the 1970s big government liberalism that preceded it is that it is an inclusive, self-help kind of liberalism. It is participatory, not passive. It is not about government saving us; it is about us saving the government.
I always thought this was obvious, but apparently not. If we wait around for someone else to save us, it will never happen. We have to be the change we want to see in the world, or we will never see it. We have to do the hard work necessary to make things better. Nothing is given to us, and nothing is guaranteed.
As Saul Alinsky once said, "We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We'll see it when we believe it."
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