Michael Wurzer Doc Searls, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, has a must-read post on the election of Barack Obama to the office of President of the United States. Regardless of your politics, this is a noteworthy moment in the history of our country as we watch two great leaders in John McCain and Barack Obama put our country first.
Doc Searls quotes Martin Luther King’s “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech and I do the same:
But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a away that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — “We want to be free.”
. . .
And that’s all this whole thing is about. We aren’t engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.
Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we’ve got to stay together. We’ve got to stay together and maintain unity.
I wrote a post tonight on our company intranet saying a fundamental truth for me is that “we all matter and that’s what matters.” Put more simply, we all want to be free. The struggle of each us together for our individual freedoms is what makes our country great, and participating in the peaceful transition of power in the most powerful country in the world is a magnificent testament to the enduring truth of a society based on freedom.