dare to hope.

Today’s my final day in the office. So I’m finally taking the time to sit down, look around and take it all in. It’s the pillars in the office that strike me the most. All of the pillars throughout the office are covered with signatures of the community leaders, staff workers, interns and local volunteers who have spent countless hours working for the cause, the cause that is boldly painted on walls “hope.action.change. Obama ‘08.”

People continue to ask me as I leave, “What did you learn from your time here?” and I’ve been pretty stumped. Sure there are the obvious things: I learned how campaigns worked, I learned how to work 12 hour days, I learned how to communicate my opinion on difficult issues and I learned the importance of civic duty. But those were implicit lessons that I knew I’d learn when I flew out to Manchester. What did I really learn on this campaign?

As cliché as it sounds now, I learned about the Audacity of Hope. In our imperfect world full of imperfect people there is a necessity for hope, a desire and belief of something better. I don’t think that we can live in this world without hope: whether it is hope in the goodness of people, hope in a better tomorrow or hope in God. Unfortunately, these days people are disillusioned by hope. They are afraid to hope because they are afraid of being let down or being wrong, and that fear is paralyzing.

It’s here on the Obama campaign that I once again discovered the audacity of hope. I’ll be honest, before I joined the campaign I was a cynic. I supported Obama but couldn’t bring myself to believe that he could win. I couldn’t bring myself to put my hope in him. But here in Manchester I met thousands of people who had put their hope in Obama, everyone from the staff worker waking up at dawn to assemble the press clips to the single mother who had shown up with her child to volunteer for the campaign. It was remarkable and it challenged me to hope once again. And it was hope that sustained me through the 12 hour days, it was hope that helped me survive the sweltering nights on the couch and it is hope that allows me to believe that Barack Obama can and will be sworn in as President on January 20, 2009.

I double-dog dare you to HOPE.