Electricity in the Air

I'm in Vancouver, BC. I look out my window to the Southeast and I can see where Mt. Baker should be in Washington State. All day, I sang to myself, bursting into gleeful cheer. Two events of significance fill me with happiness: my native Pittsburgh's own football team, The Steelers, has made it to the Superbowl. Next, I am getting a new President in 2 hours and 12 minutes. It happens around noon, East coast time, and so I cannot sleep.

Partisan values cut all the way down in me. I cannot endorse a Republican platform. Never could and never will. It's just not in me to think that anything Republicans think is rational, let alone the morally right direction for my native country to take. I'm literally ecstatic with hope, and cautious optimism about America and its relation to the world at large.

It is a time to serve, a time to lead and a time to dream.

I feel the impulse of doing philosophy giving way to a more virtuous life, an active life opposed to the thinking one. A life devoted to bettering the others directly while making a living doing it. Sometimes, I wish this, and philosophy gives me solace in the quiet act of reflective withdrawal. Yet, there's just something about taking up an issue, and devoting one's life to staking out and protecting what one cares about. Philosophy is not an active life devoted to this pursuit, but in some ways it allows for one to achieve an integrity as one pursues the infinite task of truth. Unlike public service, philosophy is massively incomplete since its problems are always present, and never conclusively resolved. With public service, one can achieve one's goal, sometimes.

Obama offered a vision of Americans working together. He offered a more optimistic, yet realistic outlook on the failures of the Bush Presidency and the Neoconservative project. Deregulated free markets do not make a good economy. Science isn't an affront to the hope and faith of a nation--it is rather what we should have faith in to know the world reliably. Moreover, guns don't make people safer, the lack of guns makes people safer. Deceptive reasons for going to war are never good, despite the rhetoric of the Right. And empowered women with equal pay and control over their bodies is better than slavery, kitchen and aprons.

There's more. There's more in my heart than I could ever spill here.