The Times, They are a Changin'

In the words of Bob Dylan, “The times, they are a changin’.”

• As I write this, 100,000 people are attending a rally in St. Louis in support of Barack Obama.
  
• More than 60,000 Indiana residents cast absentee ballots in the first week of early voting.
  
• Illinois is seeing record turnouts in early voting. In suburban Cook County 25,000 people have already voted.
  
• On the first day of early voting North Carolina more than 100,000 voted.
  
• In Georgia, more then 540,000 people have already voted, 37 percent of whom are African Americans.

Everywhere I look there is something to celebrate. Today in Racine, WI over 150 people went out to canvas in an early “Get out the Vote” effort. People walked in to the Racine headquarters from the local neighborhood and drove all the way from Chicago. People walked and called and volunteered.

People, get ready because the times, they are a changin’.

Choose Hope over Fear

This election comes down to a simple choice: Do you want to live a life of love, or do you want to live a life of fear? I'm going to tell you how I have chosen, but first I have to tell a little story.

Several years ago I was seeing a counselor to help me sort through some issues. At one point she asked me the typical, “…and how do you feel about that?” question. As she saw me struggling to come up with a word that would perfectly describe my nuanced feelings, she offered this suggestion. “Don’t try to come up with the perfect word. Just think of feelings as four primary colors – sad, mad, glad and scared. Which one of those are you feeling?” That helped a lot. After spending a lifetime learning a thousand different words for “happy,” I finally had a simple way of expressing how I felt.

For several years I continued to use this simple four-color method for sorting through my feelings. After a while I began to simplify this system further until I realized that, for me, all of my feelings came down to two – love and fear. I have found it useful to ask myself, “Right now, am I coming from love, or am I coming from fear?”

I want to live a live that comes from love, but there are a lot of forces that are working in the opposite direction. Who told me to be afraid?

There is an entire news industry whose job is to milk my glands with dire threats and imminent dangers. Someone once told me that “the body cannot absorb the amount of grief produced by our modern 24 hour news channels.” I believe that.

There are the K-Street lobbyists who would rather win a battle for funding than to really help and educate the American people. Richard Feldman, a former lobbyist for the NRA said in his new book Ricochet, “Drawing nice clean lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ to battle over makes for far more successful direct mail solicitations than actually solving problems.” How sad.

Unfortunately, some presidential candidates want us to be afraid – they want us to fear Latinos and gay people and the Jihadist who is lurking around the corner. They want us to suspect the motive of their fellow public servants and to believe their opponent in the race is the anti-Christ. Their dark scary ads warn us of the weakness of their opponents and the imminent danger brought on by voting for them. Their message is, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

Well, I choose not to live in fear. I have chosen a candidate of hope – one whose message comes from love and not fear. I have chosen to caucus for Barack Obama.

Barack Obama speaks of the importance of faith, telling us “But over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people's lives -- in the lives of the American people -- and I think it's time that we join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.”

He reminds us that justice is in OUR hands. He said “Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the crowd of thousands and said ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ He's right, but you know what? It doesn't bend on its own. It bends because we help it bend that way.”

He calls us to service, saying “I am here today to…invite you to take hold of the future of your country. Because your own story and the American story are not separate - they are shared. And they will both be enriched if we stand up together, and answer a new call to service to meet the challenges of our new century.”

Faith, hope, love, justice, service…these are the reasons I support Barack Obama. I hope you will too.