Minnesota Senate Race--Al Franken--Unemployment and Hope

Last evening my husband and I were waiting for a friend to arrive for a late dinner when the phone rang. It was a solicitor asking for money to help Al Franken pay the legal costs for the recount in Minnesota.

Loosened a bit from a glass of wine to mark the end of a busy work week, I immediately said: YES! We will contribute.

And our solicitor began to laugh with joy.

Let's face it: any job currently is better than being unemployed. I don't know if the solicitor was getting a commission. I didn't care. I wanted to share this moment of finding a "hot" prospect to support Al Franken for Senate with this stranger, even if the hot prospect was me.

Our contribution, by the way, was only $50. That's really all we could afford, because like everyone else we know, money is tight. But despite all of the dismal news from the Labor Department on unemployment (it's not 6.7% but really 12.5% when we factor in the parttime workers and those who have just given up, according to NPR. ), there is this sense of optimism, and it originates from the Office of the President Elect.

I just watched Barack Obama's Saturday morning YouTube speech in which he laid out his plans to jump start the economy by rebuilding infrastructure, refurbishing public schools, and reducing the cost of government by incorporating energy-saving features into all public buildings.

Compare Obama with Bush's Charlie Gibson interview this week in which he inarticulately divided his eight years in office into "happy days" and "not so happy days."

Are we all drawn up into unrealistic expectations for the incoming president because he is calm, articulate, and he isn't afraid to speak about the really frightening issues facing us as a nation, as families and individuals, and as a planet: economic collapse, entire countries and continents falling into anarchy, pirates cruising the Suez Canal, and isolated rebel groups trying to ascent to international prominence through the torture of a rabbi and his family in Mumbia to catapault a local organization into solidarity with an international fundamentalism Islamic anti-Zionist movement?

We are all looking to this calm man with hope. We better get fully engaged, because guess what: no one person has the answers. This is a group endeavor and we all have to participate in order for it to work. Let's put our cynicism down for a few months, at least. We should be meeting on December 13 and 14, along with other Obama supporters, to articulate what we need and send that to the new administration.

Because this is my issue: I'm not a centrist. I believe that we need radical change. Attend an Obama event in your area. We need to speak what we believe and feel, too.