sign of the times

I was disappointed to see Hillary Clinton roundly defeat Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary, but it was expected. While she still lags behind in delegates, she has a decided rational for continuing her fight. Despite repeated calls, she refuses to step aside. She questions whether or not her gender factors in the ease with which people call for her dismissal, and I don't doubt that she may be onto something there. The woman in me hates the fact that I agree with her detractors.

I cannot help but wish she would step aside, if only for one reason: to allow the country the chance to capitalize on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I've been voting since 1992 and I can't recall ever witnessing young people so energized and so eager to participate in the electoral process. Perhaps it was so in the 1960s when John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. stood as standard-bearers for change and renewal. I can only imagine the political climate at that time, but I suspect that now is another such time.

If Sen. Obama does not prevail, I am afraid that millions of young people will check-out -and if young people check-out we will lose one more generation to apathy, to immobility and to excess. And we can't afford to lose any momentum in this struggle against the vast weight of our crimes - against the planet and its people. The water resources will not hold out, our energy crisis will only worsen, the middle class will learn what it is like to be the working poor, and the working poor will find themselves homeless. "The time is now."

I do not believe or represent that Sen. Obama in himself has the resources to solve these problems -and I don't think that he does either. But the energy he has inspired among the young, the forgotten, and the disenfranchised inheritors of our great mess gives me hope that a coalition for change can be cobbled together and a "way can be made out of no way."

I wish Hillary Clinton could see it this way...