I had the weirdest sensation today when I opened my Sunday newspaper. In our house each Sunday, the kids grab the comics, the husband grabs the crossword, and my first section is always the editorials. Here in Seattle, we have an arrangement where the Sunday Seattle Times and the Sunday Seattle Post Intelligencer come in one paper. In the local section, we get the editorials and op/eds from both papers. The rest of the week, they publish separate from one another.
The Seattle Times is the more conservative of the two, but it's not as conservative, obviously as if we were in some other region of the country, or even the state of Washington.
But I digress. So I opened the paper and found.....
HOPE. Right there on the editorial page. I laid open the Seattle Times editorial page and stopped dead in my tracks. Here is what the headlines said:
"Believe the Hype: Obama's assembling an impressive team"
"Maybe it takes a community organizer to lead a country"
"Vital signs for health care reform"
"Use hard times to stimulate an infrastructure renaissance"
"Finding 5 billion: it can be done" (ok, this wasn't a particularly positive piece but the title sounded so)
The only title/headline on the entire page that did not have a positive headline was a piece by Leonard Pitts, Jr. entitled "Soft-pedaling a reign of error". It had a little drawing of W.
I may be a sap, but I was truly moved. I stopped and said to my husband, I just cannot believe this. After all the bad economic news this week, after all the doom and gloom, it seemed to me that the entire tone had changed. I realized that I don't quite know what to do with HOPE. It's a very weird feeling after 8 years of feeling like there is a huge weight sitting on the shoulders of the country.
Now, I've linked all the stories, so you can read 'em for yourself, but I just don't know how to re-create the sensation of realizing that things really may be changing! Plus, when you look at them online, some of the titles are different, and they aren't all on the same page.
Here's to the change we made happen!