Shoulders to the Wheel of Change

By Rob Okun
Guest Contributor

Barack Obama’s decisive election as the nation’s 44th president sent a jolt of clean, renewable energy around the world. Forty years after the nation was parched in a desert of despair following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., an African American has been elected president. Stunning. Electrifying.

As he did in his remarks in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night, President-elect Obama’s campaign message has consistently encouraged citizens to open the door of “possibility and change.” Now is the time for more Americans to enter, to join in the daunting but rewarding work of recasting America away from bullying and fear and toward cooperation and love. It’s time to begin spreading around the wealth of new ideas and bold programs needed to confront the crush of pressing issues facing our nation and fragile planet.

Make no mistake. President Obama cannot single-handedly create the just new world so many are hungering for; he cannot do so no matter how talented and committed a team he assembles to serve in his administration. It’s up to put our shoulders to the wheel of change, to help turn the American ship of state in a new direction.

We’ll need the same level of commitment, the same blend of idealism and pragmatism, and the same kind of community organizing key to electing Barack Obama president. The legions of dedicated citizen-activists—from rural pockets around the nation to dense neighborhoods in our largest cities—making phone calls, canvassing streets, apartments, and country homesteads, who entering data, making food, offering lodging to out-of-state activists, we’re all still here. We still care. Sure we’re tired, but we’re also “fired up and ready to go.”

This is our moment; this is our time. From graying sixties activists to our age-equivalent peers involved for the first time in a political campaign; from formerly disenchanted (and disenfranchised) citizens of color now engaged; to first-time voters of all ages; from high school and college students to 20- and 30-somethings; to zesty older folks moved to join the campaign. I met scores of them campaigning in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania throughout the fall.

One was a Connecticut man named Gene Black, a retiree in his sixties who for the final month of the campaign moved into a rooming house in Quakertown, PA, volunteering in a swing community in a swing state, working 14 hour days all over Bucks County. Like so many other citizen-campaigners, Gene is back home now resuming his “regular” life but ready to do more for the country. The change America experienced on November 4th was more than just a special moment to savor before returning to business as usual. Barack Obama’s election calls on us to ask ourselves: What else are we willing to sacrifice? What else will we volunteer to do?

Yes, it's a new day in America. And yes, tens of millions of people in the United States and around the world are still abuzz, still savoring for the first time in eight years the sweet honey of victory and its kissin’ cousins, hope and change. But after the celebrating there's always the cleaning up, the morning after.

Between now and the inauguration is a great time to reconnect with the people you canvassed or phone banked with. It's a two month window to develop an action plan for change in your community, in your neighborhood, in your home. Social change movements are living, breathing embodiments of collective energy that thrive on momentum and deteriorate when static. Remember eighth grade science? A body in motion tends to stay in motion; a body at rest tends to stay at rest. Citizen-activists, let's stay in motion.

Joseph Campbell, who used myth to explain the human experience, said if you want to change the world, change the metaphor. The election of Barack Hussein Obama has unalterably changed the American metaphor.

Although we may have crossed the color line, we have yet to reach the finish line. Our new president has inspired millions with a compelling vision of social change. It is up to us now to summon the courage and the stamina for the next leg of the generational relay race some call the American experiment in democracy.

Rob Okun is editor of Voice Male magazine. For more than 20 yeas op-eds and commentaries on the social transformation of masculinity have appeared in newspapers, in online publications and been broadcast on public radio. His essay, “Confessions of a Premature Profeminist” appears in Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power. He can be reached at raokun at verizon dot