President Obama: Change Comes to America

It's hard to fully comprehend the fact that Barack Hussein Obama is now President of the United States. 

The notion of American exceptionalism has been used to rationalize everything from Manifest Destiny to our current forays into nation building, and it frequently goes hand in hand with the idea that the West in in decline.  But the faces of the two million people on the mall today, standing as  proxies for the 63 million who turned out to vote for Barack Obama last November, are testament to the fact that America is not doomed to decline but rather equal to the task of reinventing herself in the twenty-first century.   That as a people we are capable of shaking off antiquated notions, failed ideas and ideologies, our prejudices and our obsolete certitudes as we see them to be inadequate to address the profound challenges before us.