My Mistake: It's not Yes We Did, It's still Yes We Can!

I don't know about you guys, but I had a blast last night. It was mixture of a sense of excitement, hope, achievement, and pride all heightened with a little bit of (meaning a whole lot of) alcohol! There were about 20 people at my apartment and afterwards we took to the streets of Berkeley where people were honking, climbing up lamp posts, hugging each other and giving each other high fives.

But this is by no means mission accomplished. Yes, we did win the election, and yes there are millions of people now interested in politics that weren't before, but that doesn't do much in and of itself if it ends there. A President can only do so much in one term. And what determines how much he can do is determined in large part by the political climate that allows him to take on risky positions. That's where we come in. Presidents work within the parameters of what the larger public accepts as reasonable. Sure, the good one's are the one's who are willing to risk their political prospects for a principled stance on an issue, but reality (and pragmatism) tells us that those risks are only likely to happen so many times.

So, where does that leave us? We need to use our political capital. We need to hold Barack accountable when we see him wavering. He's already been on the wrong side of several progressive causes, including having gone back on his word on FISA, having resisted calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon a few years ago, being against gay marriage, and supporting (albeit limited) drilling and the myth of clean coal. We need to keep pressuring him and not hold him above the threshold of criticism. What it also means is that we need to keep staying informed. We need to keep donating money to push progressive causes. We need to keep talking to our friends, writing letters to newspapers, funding and fighting and working for good congressional members, and so on.

We need to make activism--political and otherwise--a regular part of our lives. Volunteer at our local homeless shelters, schools, and libraries. Become an expert on an issue and hold parties in support of that cause with our friends. They'll admire our passion and it will rub off on them. It could be something like global warming, or poverty, or maybe some foreign policy issue that we care about.

The motto was we are the change we have been waiting. That didn't mean change enough to volunteer for one campaign and then disappear into the woodwork. It was changing the apathetic, passive people we were into active and passionate world citizens. Obama noted that we'd save more on energy costs if we just inflated our tires than we would by drilling for offshore oil. He was laughed at, but the point behind his message was that little steps taken together can truly produce drastic results. Yes We Can was the motto of the campaign. And Yes We Can is precisely what it should remain. The world is inherently an unfair place. There are hundreds of millions of people who no matter how smart or gifted do not have the opportunities we do. There will always be room for more that we can do. But there will also always be that massive potential for change that rests in the power of millions. This election was but one example of that power. One small step proving that, yes, in fact, we can.