The inauguration of Barack Obama was immensely emotional and a source of pride to many including yours truly. It was hard not to be swept away by both my coworkers and citizens of Cambridge watching his swearing in and address. It's more than a truism to me that electing an African American President means that we have come a long way.
I remember the segregated South that I moved to in 1959. There were signs posted by the KKK welcoming travellers to North Carolina. At my Greensboro school, a schoolyard game was called "nigger pile" where all the boys would chase down some unlucky victim and all pile on him. Ironically, I remember in 1964 when the schools were to be integrated one of the toughest kids on the schoolyard told us that we couldn't call our game "nigger pile" any more. He didn't want "no trouble". A bit crude but "blessed are the peacemakers". We still played our same old game but without a name. With equal opportunity, white and black boys unlucky enough to be caught suffered through this schoolyard hazing.
Today, Greensboro, North Carolina, the site of the first Sit Ins and KKK shootings, has a brand new Renaissance Park in the center of its downtown. It's peaceful and full of citizens of all colors in what has become a destination location in the city. No, it's not utopia, but we really have come a long way.
The President's address was powerful. He didn't hide the fact that we are entering very dangerous times and this certainly wasn't a Reaganesque "morning in America" moment. Yet, like Reagan, his words were uplifting. I along with those around me for that moment felt assured that he was going to lead us through these tough times.
As he pointed out, we certainly do need to once again find strength and enter a new era of personal responsibility. For it is also "we the people" through our excesses who share blame for the problems we face.
Good feelings aside, parts of his address concern this old lover of the America of constitutionally limited government. Despite his assertion to the contrary, the debate about whether government is small or large enough is hardly over. This is a question as old as the Republic and a core concept of our Constitution. While I appreciated the President's insistence that poor performing programs would be cut, he doesn't seem to understand that ever growing government entitlements undermine the other pillar of his program and vision. The greatest enemy of an era of new personal responsibility IS ever expanding government. This was the harshest lesson from my own urban activist days in Philadelphia. There, every program under the sun was available but there it was also increasingly more difficult to organize people to fend for themselves. The natural energy of the free citizen willing to take personal responsibility for their problems had been sapped by the very programs meant to empower them.
This President is brilliant so it's hardly an over site. Many think that the time of limited government is past. After eight years of the "conservative" Bush administration expanding the federal government beyond even LBJ's wildest dreams, these folks may have a point. Also, electorally, tax consumers (reinforced by the now likely amnesty for illegal aliens) may soon OUT VOTE tax producers. What do folks who don't pay taxes care about the future of limited government? More taxes mean more programs for them. There is a flaw in this picture, however. Only the most brute force of a rapacious tax revenue hungry majority could sustain this scenario for a while. Ultimately it would collapse like the Soviet Union because it would be the best example of the worst kind of "taxation without representation".
So here I am conflicted, proud of America's great accomplishment, and yet concerned about the future of its greatest accomplishment, our Constitution and the concept of limited government supported by sturdy self reliant citizens.
