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Updated Saturday, January 2, 2010 12:03 am TWN, By Marc Cooper, Special to The Los Angeles Times

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'Ought' Lang Syne

The great economic earthquake of 2008 was, in some sense, a tumultuous, involuntary spasm of an entity already in its afterlife. Starting with the congressional elections of 2006, the American people were openly clamoring for an ousting of the exhausted. Two years later, in the midst of the financial meltdown, millions more resolutely voiced their dissent by electing a young, vibrant and relatively inexperienced African American as president based on his two-word platform of “change” and “hope.”

Some thought a new day was upon us. But Barack Obama's first year in office has been sobering to those who naively believed that changing the world required only a few minutes in a voting booth. Part product of and part challenger to an ossified and obsolete system, Obama has struggled to lift the curtain on the new. We can all ponder the wouldas and shouldas when it comes to his strategy — and that of the Democratic majority in Congress — but that is all idle Beltway chatter compared to the larger question we face. A choice that just happens, by pure serendipity, to coincide with the coming of a new year and a fresh decade.

The old world is dead. But the new one still struggles to be born. The decisions we face in the coming decade are infinitely more awesome than what — if anything — the “public option” will or will not be, or how deep or not Obama should have bowed, or even who will dominate the House in 2010.

More important, do we have the collective will as a nation to imagine a completely new chapter in our history without resorting to a knee-jerk nostalgic yearning for the yesteryear of either the New Deal or “Morning in America”? Can we, together, begin to move beyond hubris and denial and into the realm of healing our profound ills? Or are we destined this next decade to continue languishing in a sort of political and moral purgatory that rejects the old but refuses to conjure the new? New Year's Day seems the right moment to decide.

Marc Cooper is director of Annenberg Digital News at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

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