Change

The word of the year is shaping up to be “Change." It’s being sold from the lips of politicians, in the latest music, and from the heads of sporting organizations. The reason for this is because America has lost most of our heroes. Where there were once sports giants, we see only drug and cheating scandals, the popular music that is being sold to us is so formulaic and stale that we look to top rated karaoke TV shows for new “artists," and our leading politicians have the respect and approval slightly better than a villain in a Dickens novel. Truth be told, the number of people we can still look up to is few.

Most of this is our own fault. There is nothing that the American public likes more than building people up only to knock them down. Think of a child creating a tower of blocks. He may construct them with absolute care and purpose, but in no time at all he will reemerge as a two foot tall Godzilla in Oshkosh overalls on a self-fulfilling mission for total tower destruction. We as a public are that child with our heroes.

So following our recent failed attempts at nation building and restructuring the world as we see it, we have decided to internalize the problem and create some new American Gods. We can see the beginning of them forming now. And the nominee for the leader of this change seems to be Obama. He is not another legacy, a case of nepotism, or simple repetition. What he represents is a break with what has become our slide towards mediocrity caused by our comfort and want for predictability.

In recent months Obama has shifted away from in-depth policy discussions in the debates to speaking only of Hope and Change through vague, yet extremely uplifting, generalities. His campaign seems to understand that we have become disgusted with wanting something so banal, pandering, and readily identifiable because we can no longer settle for sub-par idols. They know that we need a hero, someone to believe in again, and that above all else our country wants to hear, “And Now for Something Completely Different.” He is fulfilling these needs that by trumpeting change and backing it up with well publicized, yet no longer openly sold, ideas.

America wants a presidential election where the two candidates represent who we were and who we will become. We want a chance to prove that we are not our recent leaders, we are not religious fanatics hell-bent on Authoritarianism, we do not stand for self justified idiocy at home and aboard, and more than anything else, we are not George Bush.

This fall, I will be voting for Barack Obama because he represents the change that I want to see in America.