When you're a little kid everyone asks you what you want to be when you grow up. I said a baseball player. Then you get a little older and they ask you what your goals are. I usually said, I don't know, to become president?"" By the time I came to college I had broadened this goal a bit. Now I just want to change the world.
As some of you may know, I've spent the last six months working for Students for Barack Obama for exactly this reason: I want to change the world. Judging by the 80 percent of you who joined me in voting for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., on Feb. 19, many of you share this goal, or at least realize the opportunities an Obama presidency can bring.
As Obama has said, many critics claim he stands for blind optimism. The 20,000 people who showed up at the Kohl Center last week only respond to his rhetoric of hope and optimism because they are entranced by a great orator. They ask how Obama can fulfill his promises and whether he has the kind of experience needed to become president.
But this experience argument is fallacious. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., can claim she has 35 years of experience, but, using her own standards, Obama has 25 years of experience, if only because he's 10 years younger. Obama has been in elected office longer and has a more meaningful legislative record with key bills dealing with campaign finance reform and student loans than Clinton.
Furthermore, on the most important issue of our generation, Obama got it right. He had the foresight and judgment to see that we were headed into a war with the wrong opponent - a war that would severely hurt our ability to fight terrorism and would divide our country even further.
Although these are just a handful of reasons why I support Obama, it still comes back to that idea of change. Obama has called on our generation to rise up and hope for a better future, one free of partisan bickering and social injustice. One without red states and blue states, simply the United States of America.
Critics have continually attacked this theme, claiming Obama offers nothing but false hope. But as Obama said in his speech after the New Hampshire primary, ""In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.""
In fact, they oppose his message of change. In his victory speech on Tuesday, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he'd fight ""to make sure Americans are not deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change.""
I don't want to live in a world where a call for change can ever be referred to as empty.
Obama is not going to change the world by himself, but his call for change does not rest on him alone. Instead it rests in the hearts of millions like me who can draw on his inspiration and finally believe in their own ability to truly change it.
He's made a lot of promises over the past year of campaigning, and who knows if he can fulfill all of them. For me, that doesn't really matter, because for the first time in our lives, we have a presidential candidate who is willing to make those promises. We have a candidate who is willing to challenge us and ask us for something in return because he knows that he cannot do this alone.
Obama's candidacy represents a transformational moment in our nation's history not because he is black, but because it symbolizes this divide between the old order and the new order. A divide so deeply entrenched that most of those who have been around long enough barely realize it's there.
It is time to get beyond the fights of the past and start looking toward the future. A future full of optimism, hope and change is the right kind for me. Tuesday's primary showed that 80 percent of you feel the same about Obama's promise of change, but it's not over yet. A lot more work is needed until November and beyond if we ever hope to fulfill this promise.
Erik Opsal is a senior majoring in journalism and political science. Please send responses to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
