Should we be hopeful?

There is a difference between historic and historical.

Historic means something that is important in history. Historical is relating to history (such as 'historical fiction').

No matter what color your voting record is, we experienced a historic event today in Washington D.C., and there will be many historical accounts of it as we progress.

A few million people decided to hike on down and witness (in person, not on TV like I did) Barack Obama being sworn in as our 44th president.

Every news station, Web site and whatnot has been following not just the speeches but each time the new president makes a right step, as well as a left step. In our information overkill days, this has been a bit much. Luckily, I'm a work and have a few things to do in between CNN and MSNBC.

I'm hopeful for the future. I'm hopeful the progress and the hope is not just wishful thinking. As a friend said to me yesterday, "When the honeymoon is over, I guess we'll find out where we stand." Jay, I agree.

But we still need to hope for the best. I'm all for Obama. The better he does, the better our nation will be. I've actually heard some of the talking heads wish him complete failure. Kind of stupid to do that, don't you think? You want the leader to fail. If someone leads me into a house or a building, I don't want that person to not be able to find his/her way around safely. Heck, they're leading. If they lead, we follow. If they fail, we fail.

But I hope we can get out of this war. I hope we can get out of this recession. I hope we can get the unemployment rate down. And I hope we can move forward. There's just one thing about moving forward that worries me.

Remember the '50s? I wasn't even alive, but I remember the idea of the '50s. Remember how that shifted into the '60s, then the free love of the '70s and the awkwardness of the '80s, and the technological boom of the '90s? I'm afraid that has died.

Here's what I mean. We can't have the "modern" decade anymore because technology shifts so quickly now, that if something is five or six years old, it's probably very, very outdated.

So, with that being said, the "change" we need in government is going to take a big, huge, large, massive shakeup. We can't try to compete in a 21st Century world with mid-20th Century ideas. But instead of saying our way of doing things is 60 years out of date, tying in the fact that the five year thing is outdated, how outdated can 60-year type policy be?

I don't think we're going to get that in four years. Maybe if we didn't have such a bad economy right now. But I am hopeful. I am.