Like many of you I have been sorting out my reactions to Obama?s victory. While hope is strong, almost overwhelming, there is in that hope a degree of desperation. As we have too often re-learned over the past half-century, hope is a fragile emotion, subject not only to faulty vision but also to accident, incompetence, malevolence and corruption. In that regard, I have two fears: 1) The challenges we face are enormous, not yet fully understood, and capable of overwhelming us. They may prove to be insurmountable. 2) Is our new President strong enough to do battle with the various Washington forces lined up against him? Obama is an inspirational leader with a clear vision, but can he play major league hardball?

For Christmas my son sent me a copy of the Rolling Stone commemorative edition, Barack Obama and the Triumph of Hope. Other than ?change,? no word appeared more often in the Obama campaign. ?Hope? fed our adrenalin. More than at any other time during my seventy-two years, hope linked to vision seems to be ascendant. I still believe what I stated in Folding Paper Cranes, an Atomic Memoir: ?Without vision there can be no hope; and without hope vision dies.? No one in my lifetime has combined hope, vision and apparent political power like Obama.

...

As a college senior John F. Kennedy?s Inaugural Address and its appeal to idealism quickened me. Out of JFK?s speech came the Peace Corps, Vista, increased white involvement in the Civil Rights movement, and a host of NGOs that encouraged volunteerism. Two years later, in April of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his ?I Have a Dream? speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and fed the idealistic energy that Kennedy had unleashed.

As a result, I joined a group of graduate students who worked to increase cultural diversity and end miscegenation in Salt Lake City. My particular agenda in the group was to encourage the Mormon hierarchy to change Church policy toward African-American males, who were excluded from the Priesthood. Sad to say, the Elders did not receive the proper ?revelation? from God until more than a decade later, long after I had left Utah. The only real effect of my efforts at the time was to accelerate my exit from the Mormon Church.

Like millions of other shocked people around the world, I spent the days following JFK?s assassination glued to a television set. Dread replaced hope; something beautiful and exceptional had died. Over the next five years our country experienced increasing division and unrest. The only bright spot for many of us was the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. Abroad, the Viet Nam War was building in intensity and going badly, opposition to racial justice was becoming more violent, and the peace and justice movements only succeeded in dividing the country. Rather than hope, many of us experienced increasing alienation and disillusionment, as America drifted into a political and civic limbo of anger, fear and distrust.

And then came the various catastrophes of 1968. In January the Tet Offensive proved to be a strategic victory for the Viet Cong, and the year went downhill from there: King?s assassination in April, followed by weeks of riots and burning cities; the McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June; in August the televised catastrophe of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, followed by Nixon?s victory in November. We all know the tragic tale that ensued: By the time we finally pulled out of Viet Nam five years later, our troops had suffered an additional thirty thousand KIA and close to a quarter million WIA. Viet Nam, of course, fared far worse.

Over those five years the anti-war movement gradually expanded to include a majority. However, what little hope many of us still possessed failed to survive Watergate, the Reagan years, the Iran-contra deceits, and a bellicose and arrogant foreign policy based on blind hubris. During these long decades those of us who believed in and worked for peace and justice saw our government as blind, self-serving, incompetent and hypocritical. Hope was at its nadir.

A majority of Americans seemed incapable of comprehending our major problems. We denied our failings and, rather, celebrated our perceived strengths, virtues and exceptionalism; we became intoxicated by our delusions. Tragically, most of our leaders catered to our baser appetites and fed those delusions. The affluent society slowly morphed into the effluent society. In the four decades just past, America has been living (or, rather, living it up) on borrowed time. We have been, and still to some degree are, a nation in denial, unwilling or unable to confront reality.

So where are we today? And what about all this hope for change that is ballyhooed by Obamaites and the pundits? Sometimes wisdom, courage and strength result from hitting bottom. This year the epiphanies have come hard, but they have come. Whether they are sufficient or not remains to be seen. Nevertheless, we seem, finally, to realize that we are in a quagmire of our own making. If the election of Barack Obama is any indication, we may be starting to ?get it.?

So here is my hope: There are times in history where seemingly impossible crises give birth to great leaders, and the fool-ridden world is once again saved from itself. Obama seems to be such a leader. Increasing numbers of Americans seem to understand: We must change our ways. We believe, pray and hope that we finally have a leader to match the challenges before us--as opposed to the tragi-comic clown who misgoverned for eight disastrous years. So, yes, I do possess hope, a hope that is stronger and deeper than at any time in the last forty years.