Is there any hope?

It was my privilege to see and hear an address by Berak Obama yesterday. He was making an appearance to promote sales of his book, The Audacity to Hope.
Senator Obama's appeal is easy enough to understand when you listen to the jest of his remarks and analyse his thinking process. He is clearly what so many main street Americans are looking for in their leaders. He is a pragmatic, fiscally conservative, and a champion of the vast majority of people, who until recently thought they were middle class only to find that status was preempted by stagnant income and increasing cost of basic things such as fuel, health care, and food.
Obama is able to define the problems of American life in ways that the guy on the street can undersand and identify with. It doesn't hurt Obama's cause that all of a sudden, the press and the people of the United States have suddenly seen what our friends and allies all over the world have known for some time. George Bush and friends are not in step with the world and the way it operates today.
Like the the conservatives they represent, they want very much to roll back social change and progress to a time that may have not ever existed except on TV programs such as Mayberry RFD and Happy Days. While for many people that may be nostalgic and comfortable, for most of us it is a vague memory of the way we might want to remember the past, but a poor representation of reality.
If you think there is racism now you should have lived in the fifties. If women think there is a glass ceiling they should remember that their mothers were not often even let into the building.
Our American society is an evolving thing. Some one is always working at the edges. But there are some core values of fairness, mutual respect and the chance for opportunity that has characterized us. Those values, not the ones the politicians keep claiming are the ones that most of us aspire to keep alive. Obama may be the right man for a troubled time or it may be that if Obama hadn't come along we would have to go looking for him.