“The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted.” — Psalm 46:6

” What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them…” — Barak Obama

Brethren,  I used to work as a political organizer — I got disgusted by the cynicism of many in the field.  While political deal-making is the art of compromise, a deal can be struck between battling factions that is so watered down that it is almost worse than no deal at all for anyone.  Even when politics works, it is a messy business.  However, too many who have been in power for too long have been too cynical.  The public does not help matters when it says that all politicians are crooks, that they are all just in it for themselves.

I present to you this photo in today’s’ news of a woman moved to tears by today’s inauguration.  I presume, never having met her, that President Obama’s election and institution represents for her the healing of past wounds perceived or borne because she is a woman of color.

That said, if my anecdotal evidence means a thing, cynicism has got to find a rock to hide under for at least the next four years.   I knew plenty of white folks, too, weeping with joy today at around noon, including me, those who have been disenfranchised by business as usual in the government of the cynical and the toadying over the masses of people who just want stuff to be fair are also ready for a new day, and we have somebody who is actually prepared to confront the politics of the stupid and usher in the era of politics of hope and hopefully virtue.

He had me at hello.

He had me at his first complete sentence, at his first demonstrated ability to distinguish between Sunnis and Shiites, at his ability to find Pakistan on a map.  For the last eight years I have felt tyrannized by politics organized in the name of my savior around a man of blithering, shocking stupidity propped up by the worst cynicism imaginable since Machiavelli.  The few idealists he brought to Washington with him he made a mockery of by lying outright about what he was willing to do.  The few Republican moderates he placed in visible positions  — he destroyed their careers.  He did this by making people like ex-New Jersey governor and local Republican Party outsider — the smoky rooms flatly refused to promote her candidacy when she ran for governor because she was a woman — Christine Todd Whitman, a known environmentalist, the spokes person for the worst environmental policies since the virtual extinction of the Buffalo, and by making Colin Powell, who could have won the presidency only a few years earlier, the spokes person for a boldfaced lie to the United Nations.

I am personal friends  with a few ex personal friends of W.  I am struck by their willingness to forgive him public slights of them for politics’ sake.  I say good riddance to bad company.

Today, I found myself weeping and praying, yes, praying and praying, for this new president’s safety and success, so that the woman in the photo above gets whatever she wanted to see in government when she came to Washington to stand on a freezing cold mall and see her candidate sworn in.

The ground has shifted because people finally decided that they would have no more of this cynicism, and we rejected it, finally, like the Earth shaking off bad architecture in a tremor.

President Obama says, “What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them.”  Brethren, we were the ground beneath them.  We were getting walked on, and enough of us moved in the same direction at the same time, undistracted by stupid arguments and arguments in favor of stupidity.  We were undistracted by raging heathen.  Instead, God uttered His voice, and the Earth melted.  We melted.

I admonish all those Christians on the Right, usually women with the same CNN newscaster haircut, no matter which ultra-Right-wing-legalistic church I met them at, who told me that George W. Bush was placed in office by God as evidenced by his election (or Supreme Court appointment), and whom I had to tolerate with a grim nod and a change of subject to believe the same thing about Obama, who has surely been placed by a vote in office, and by the same logic, is an anointed, God-appointed leader.   I want to hear that out of the same lips that told me that I was unChristian for criticizing a man whose family stood to gain so much money by the war in Iraq for going there.  I want to hear them say to me that God pointed to the political Left in America and we are under His divine guidance in the Obama administration.

Actually, even in Eden, we had the free will not to do what God wanted us to do — so the whole argument of God-interference in human elections is rather stupid and unbelieving.  We are to pray for all those in authority.  I prayed for Bush to have wisdom, or at least grammar, but God did not perform a miracle, unless you count the one we have had today.

It felt like 11 degrees Farenheit today on the Washington Mall.  Aretha Franklin’s voice was obviously scratchy from the frost.  However, the Earth melted.

The ground has shifted.  The price of freedom is constant vigilance.  May we remain vigilant and unwilling to be walked on by cynics with ambitions which mock our own.  Amen.