Hope is a total imperative. There’s no way to go but up, as the hallowed cliché goes, especially when you’re down. Since fortunes go round like a wheel, hope is what recurs as often, periodical, and regular as the shifting of night into day. Hope is the nourishment of the soul as food is to the body. Hope is for mental health. It is also the single most effective strategy that can make us look forward to waking up yet another day. It is the mantra of 2009 (and probably well into the years beyond 2009 as no one can predict the end of the current global recession).

Obama is stoking the fires of great expectations: energy independence, reducing health care costs, improving education and helping low-wage and middle-income workers. His biggest promise is to get the US economy moving again. This means the world’s economy, too, as all roads eventually lead back to the land of promise. If he does not get the economy of his own country moving at the soonest possible time, there won’t be money to get his policy goals moving either (because his promised goals are undeniably cash-intensive).

There is already an outright problem, though. For starters, his ‘change’ campaign is seen as lame amidst the fact that the cabinet members he has been choosing are from previous administrations and who were actually the very ones responsible for the current US economic mess. And most importantly (and also most alarmingly), Obama’s economic policy does not really include a genuine reform of the US financial industry. Questions remain if Obama is really up and keen to reform the massive greed that drove the US financial industry to the ground.

In reality, hope does not necessarily and immediately translate to faith. This can happen, too, alright, but only in the realm of religion which is the last bastion of all things unexplainable. In real terms, hope remains only such if there’s no proof of change. Since ‘change’ was the buzzword of 2008 and ‘hope’ the current one, let’s all hope (big time) that ‘faith’ be the buzzword after 100 days henceforth or so. If ‘change’ and ‘hope’ are Obama’s key words, the word ‘faith’ can only belong to the people, never to him. Although, even if we admit or not, Obama is the only right now who can, indeed, put that word in our lips – bar none.

With hope come great expectations. The new president of the (still) most powerful nation on earth holds the world’s fate in his hands right now.

Believe it or not.

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Via Reuters