Castles in trees

The day of the Obama inauguration, CBC radio asked for reactions from listeners. In addition to the many who expressed great joy and enthusiasm, several were appalled at the amount of time, money and effort spent on the event, and others were disgusted by the outpouring of emotion for "just another politician." Recent events make their cynicism understandable. They see no hope in the efforts of a single man; they feel no optimism for a world weighted down by war, ruined economies and environmental degradation. Nothing positive can trump the awful hand they believe fate has dealt them and all of us. They lack perspective, perhaps, those nay-sayers. Or maybe they never developed the imagination to visualize the improbable, or build a marvellous fort out of a cardboard box, or create an impregnable castle in a tree.
Most people felt joy during the inauguration, and on the faces of many of the older American observers, the joy was expressed in tears. For once the symbolic significance of this particular African-American's election to America's highest office far outweighed the concrete realities he faces. The memories and lingering images of Selma and Birmingham, Alabama, of burning churches and police dogs, of three great leaders and three assassinations, of napalm and chaos in Viet Nam, and smart bombs and chaos in Iraq, all those memories and countless others bubbled to the surface in the minds of those older observers, who hoped that, though he could not make the memories disappear, he could show once and for all that they represented merely painful steps on the road that led to the fulfilment of all the lofty promises of the American constitution.
The more significant aspect of Obama's inauguration might be that so many people the world over could find such joy and hope in a symbolic event, that our capacity for dreaming and imagining, speculating and envisioning has not been diminished by world crises. It is after all what led us to create constitutions in the first place. And castles in trees.