America: 5 Days to Remember

Five more days. I try to change channels on the TV whenever politics come on, I am tired of the vitriolic personal attacks, the sly emails from , yes, friends that show Obama in one bad light after another. Yesterday it was a video morphing Obama’s face into that of the devil. I hear normally perfectly rational people say that Obama is the anti-Christ, etc. It would be laughable if these weren’t intelligent people espousing the ignorance and spewing it out themselves. It hurts. Five more days. Five more days and we can all be friends again. Five more days and we can return to work without hearing the slurs whispered and passed around about Obama and those who support him. Five more days before we can be the United States of America again, not the divided one we are today.

I listened to Barack Obama last night and felt inspired and proud to be an American citizen who came as an immigrant with his mother and sister on a ship to New York at the age of one and a half years. The warmth of genuine patriotism that Obama generated was all inclusive, healing and uniting for all Americans of every race, gender and creed. Looking at him as he sat with his daughters, I saw no anti-Christ, I saw a father. I too am a father with two daughters. No, I will never be a candidate for President of The United States of America but on the level of fatherhood Obama joins me on a common ground where human love and family bring us all together. We all rise from out beds, dress and begin our days the same. Our careers and our hours at work may be vastly different but when we return to the refuge of our homes we again are the same and it is then that we have to remember our common bonds as loving and caring humans.

Obama seeks to remind us of our commonality and reminds us of the true Christian mission which is not politics but is to care for each other as we would have others care for us and to love one another as God has loved us. We are made in God’s image. That image is not one of corporate CEO’s hoarding their wealth and decrying the need to take on any extra burden of taxation to ease the burden carried by their brothers and sisters in the middle class. That image is not of a candidate constantly flinging personal attacks at his opponent in politics. To be a Christian is not to be one of the ‘right’ or ‘left’ persuasion in politics. It is to believe in the message of Jesus and to devote one’s life to following those teachings in your own personal life and in all the aspects of one’s life.

So, there are five days left and now we need to heal. It is time for the persistent drumbeats of manic politics to cease in five days. It is time for peace. It is time to return to our homes and our families and remember what we have in common. God’s image is the face of love and that, we need to remember. Pray that in five days, we can all remember that.