Time for us all to return home

The News Virginian
Published: November 5, 2008

Americans awakened Wednesday – some still under euphoria’s sway, others in gloomy resignation – to the end of almost two years of running, culminating in a single burst of emotion and expression. This presidential election demonstrated many things: first, that the specter of the racial divide is a vanishing shadow, and, much farther down the list, that the campaigns are too long. Now there are tasks.

President-elect Barack Obama’s might be the tallest, because it is constructed on the towering layers of expectations he has stacked one on top of the other since beginning his climb to the mountaintop in 2006.

He promised, most particularly, to transcend partisanship and bring change, phrases and terms he declines to define. Whatever their meaning, a partisan divide remains even as that of race has narrowed to a slender gap. A sharp lurch leftward will lengthen the former. That was tried by Clinton, the strongest Democratic president of the last half-century. The 1994 Republican Revolution was the result. Obama must temper elements in his party and within himself that would pull the country in a direction many Americans remain unwilling to go.

Those who resisted, some fervently, the Obama inertia that drove him headlong into the Oval Office have tasks, too. The first is to recognize what happened. Here is a bit of help: Conservatives lost their souls. Blind for want of vision, they fumbled in darkness for victory’s door while Obama waxed eloquent with his hand resting on the knob. Conservatives lost Tuesday not because of their conservatism but because of their abandonment of it.

A rotting plank in that philosophy needs repairing. It centers on the conviction that government and American life ought to revolve not around Washington but communities. Working arm in arm with neighbors, whatever their political stripe, to build and shape our towns helped forge this as a place like no other. Modern America looks inward, then to Washington, but rarely across the hedges. The country is not better for it.

There are a few points at which philosophies right and left can be drawn to intersect, and those points invariably are found in communities rather than that strange, remote world inside the Beltway. Here is the real task for those Americans who lack a political title. Building strong towns and neighborhoods, laboring to ensure that strength isn’t sapped by challenges left unanswered, looking to where we’re going rather than lamenting where we are and longing for where we’ve been.

Nowhere in America is this task more important than greater Augusta, and especially in one of its former jewels, Waynesboro. The region’s communities are aging and its economies are turning steadily less diverse, particularly in the wake of several company closings over the summer. Time is slipping away to avert a crisis as a result of a persistent loss of young people, who drift now in a steady flow across our region’s boundaries into places where opportunities still grow.

These trends stand now against the backdrop of an exhilarating and exhausting political campaign. For months, the country’s attention – and this space with it – has been consumed by the election’s wild ride. Eyes have been riveted to polls and ears tuned to anchors, commentators and bloviators. People of all persuasions have been wearied by it all. No time is better than now for turning our sights toward home.