Ake, I appreciate the tenor of your post and you may well be right. I agree that this mess is the result of the cumulative snowballing effect of deep rooted corruption, corrosive greed and misguided methods.

I do *not* expect President Obama to fix things back to whatever we considered normal. To my mind, the best we can hope for is that we can make incremental steps to stabilize the chaotic tumbling we are currently experiencing.

If we can get to a point in the next couple of years where we can point to such gains, at that point I hope that we rethink and revise our whole attitude regarding our country, our culture, our place in the world and what we want out of it.

It is a different world and we can't go back, even if we wished it.

May I say that I am grateful beyond words that it is Obama who is the head of this effort and not McCain.