Letter from America: The People's Choice

Portland, Oregon

November 22

Passing through America in November 2008 you can't avoid the election of Barak Obama at the beginning of the month. It has blasted a crater too big. You can't get around it.

Be they Democrats or Republicans, lean right or left; whether to their minds it is the breaking light of a new day dawning or the first sprinkles of fallout before a four year political winter, Americans are collecting their thoughts about what happened here. It's sitting there in the back of their minds, on the tips of their tongues, struggling to get out.

Maybe it's because I live far away, but I think that by electing Obama Americans cashed a note signed when slaves were emancipated 150 years ago. Obam took the last step in the march Martin Luther King Jr. started in Montgomery, Alabama. For me, this election wasn't about the next four years, but about the last 50 and the 50 to come. But alot of Americans aren't like me. They don't care about history. They live here, and they're worried about now.

Some Americans, apparently most, think that Obama is a savior that will extract them from the mud of a foriegn war and shore up a failing economy. Others say he's an antichrist (?) that has seduced the nation.

But from where I come from, detached and distant, I see this: nobody knows yet what the next four years will bring. The Bush administration isn't a hard act to follow; maybe all will be well. Maybe not. All I know is that it's too early to tell.

Leaders are servants of God. It is through them that He blesses some countries and punishes others. The democratic process has led people to believe that they are in some way masters of their own destiny, but despite of or even because of the fact that they elect their leaders, it is really only the means that God uses to reward nations, for better or for worse.

He just lets them choose their poison.