Change is inevitable, and something that happens so often in life that it almost seems normal after awhile. We all go through periods of change in our lives, and some are expected, while others are not. Some change is good, while some change leaves us worse off than before. As the central theme of the 2008 presidential election, we have seen first hand how people deal with change, and something that we haven’t seen before.
As Barack Obama ran for office, we saw a critical change in our culture. The people of America were actually going to vote for a black man as president? The same country that had never had anything other than a middle-aged white man as president? The same country that used blacks as free labor at one point in time? The same coutnry that didn’t even allow blacks to vote just thirty years ago?
We saw how people reacted to this possibility. We saw the hope that change can bring, and the motivation that it provided people to prove that we were different than our past suggested.
Change through is a struggle. We never look at the unknown with a sense of pride, or a sense that we are about to get into something better. We always tend to look at it with fear, as if change will hurt us. Taking the concept of letting a black man be president a few steps further, lets remember that the right to vote, and even the right for blacks to be free was a huge change in itself.
There was an entire war fought around the concept that slavery should be abolished. There were riots, and protests, and civil society broke down in the name of civil rights for all. We tend to cling to the stats quo, and not allow things to change easily.
It can be tough, no doubt about it, and change is scary. We don’t know how it effects us until it actually happens. That is why so many relationships take forever to end, because we are never sure how we will get over it until we actually just go and end the relationship. I think though that once we progress from one stage of life, to the next, that we see that change isn’t always bad, and that it gives us a chance to grow, and expand our horizons so to speak.
Change is scary, but change is necessary. As Jimmy Buffett once wrote “Changes in attitudes, changes in latitudes, nothing remains quite the same.. if we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.” Stuff happens to us, we just have to learn to live, and laugh off what we can, and not dwell on the past.
