It’s sobering to realize that I haven’t written in this blog since August of 2007 at the end of the summer before the fall 2007 semester. As we get older, time flashes by, and so much can happen in what seems like an incredibly short time.

While the war in Iraq isn’t killing as many Americans, though more than 4,200 have died in Iraq and Afghanistan,  I don’t have a good feel for what this means for Iraqis when even one violent death corrupts the living. How many thousands or hundreds of thousands have died? How many more have been injured?

And the economy is getting so bad that in the back of the plane one flight attendant on my return trip from New York City to see Joe and Mina couldn’t stop talking to the other attendants about contract disputes and retirement. I was flying economy, of course. First class didn’t hear the sometimes panicky, other times angry tone of their concerns that didn’t extend to passengers who could hear everything at a distance even over the roar of jet engines. After all of the greed and corruption and collusion and self-serving rationalizations, we’re all worried about our jobs and money.

But hope returned again with the election of Barack Hussein Obama, the child of a white woman from Kansas and an African man from Kenya, who will become our 44th president in one week, a reality after a magical campaign that I would have attributed to a Hollywood happy ending if it weren’t actually happening. Now intelligent discourse will return to our lives. Now science will play a prominent role again in solving our problems. And maybe war will decline, health will increase (because of health care, not my exercise plan no matter how hard I commit to change), and education will gain a new ascendancy because Obama, as is clear from the books he has written — I’ll be using Dreams from My Father in my English 1 class — knows how to think critically in a way I haven’t experienced in a president since JFK.

It should be quite a year.