Promised Land

Representative John Lewis said last night, before Barack Obama's speech accepting the Democratic nomination to the Presidency, that this is not yet the Promised Land, but it's "a big down-payment, a big down-payment."

I am grateful to live in a land and among a people who get better, who manifest a spark of redemption, who take a social compact and aspirations to heart and who bend our history toward justice. I praise God for an America where Barack Obama is possible forty years after Martin Luther King, who was not possible himself forty years earlier. American women struggled for suffrage for 80 years before grasping the right to vote with the 19th Amendment, and here we stand beneath a shattering glass ceiling.

This is why I am a progressive, because we can see with our own eyes, in our own lives, across the breadth of a generation, that we can get better and better.