This was my favorite part of the speech:

This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice. So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.

It was my favorite because of the starkness by which his ideas stand out from those of our current president, whose worldview suggests that our patriotism is directly proportional to the number of dollars we spend on consumer goods and the number of rights we are willing to take away from our fellow citizens. Our leadership is long overdue in reminding us that it takes more than just dollars to be patriotic, more than just words to get something done. It takes time, energy, commitment, effort, willpower, and leaders that believe genuinely in their sense of civic responsibility, who insist upon representing the interests of their electorate in their entirety. Leaders willing to ask for something from us besides our votes, to take responsibility for our own actions. Leaders willing to ask us to put aside our selfish propensities, and to take the reign of government into our own hands and do something with it. Barack Obama is that kind of leader, and that is why I think he will make a great President. The additional fact that he’s read the Constitution doesn’t hurt either.

ps this guy (from newseek, below) agrees with me, though he talks about sacrifice as if it is something that the President needs to “sell” to the populace. I actually don’t think it needs “selling.” I think we’re sold, we just might not know it yet. After all, we’re not all that unrealistic. Entropy argues that without significant inputs of energy — in the form of warfare — we can’t long maintain the enormous disparities that exist within our country and without, that to achieve peace and prosperity in the long term will require raising the standards of living of billions of people in distant parts of the planet while simplifying and scaling back our own. Some will see this as sacrifice, others will see it as freedom. For the “youth” — those of us who were born after 1978, and who until yesterday had never voted in a presidential election in which George W. Bush was not running — this may come as a shock, because nothing like it has ever been asked of us. But I think we’re up to it. Ask and ye shall receive.

To the blatant racists: you were wrong yesterday, you are wrong today, and you’ll still be wrong tomorrow unless you can change your minds. Hopefully 8 years of Barack Obama will provide the medium and impetus you need to do that.

To the “race blind” pseudo-racists: you can’t force someone to dig a hole, push them into it, and leave them there to rot forever without generating a little resentment. Especially when you decide, grudgingly, decades or centuries later, that maybe you’ve done something wrong– it’s not enough just to call down the hole and say “oops, uh, sorry about that” and walk away. The right thing to do is to lower a rope, even if it was your daddy that forced his daddy to dig that bloody hole. Well, that rope never got lowered, and blithely pretending that the hole doesn’t exist just doesn’t cut it. Accusatorily pointing out that it has only gotten deeper is a repudiation of late-20th century history and only serves to breed further resentment.

To everyone else: I suspect that very few people voted for Barack Obama literally because of the color of his skin. What I do believe is that a lot of people voted for Barack Obama because they saw him as someone who, knowing the dangers and difficulty of the task, damn well climbed out of that figurative, historical hole anyway, using education, temerity, and hope as his only tools. And that’s something worthy of admiration, no matter how much melanin you’ve got. I hope his success provides an example for persons of every creed and color to rise above themselves and fill in that god-awful hole-in-the-ground blight-on-the-earth for all time, forgive each other, and move on.