{"id":2989,"date":"2008-11-04T21:38:15","date_gmt":"2008-11-05T04:38:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/?p=2989"},"modified":"2026-01-21T16:35:48","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T00:35:48","slug":"after-eight-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2008\/11\/04\/after-eight-years\/","title":{"rendered":"After Eight Years"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For the first time in eight years, I feel hopeful about the future of our country. I am thrilled with the historic presidential election results. <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In his famous Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln urged every American to take on &#8220;the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far nobly advanced.&#8221; That work remained unfinished, though, for a century and a half. For despite decades of civil rights legislation, judicial interventions and social activism &#8212; despite Brown v. Board of Education, Martin Luther King&#8217;s I-have-a-dream crusade and the 1964 Civil Rights Act &#8212; the Civil War could never truly be said to be over until America&#8217;s white majority actually elected an African-American as president.<\/p>\n<p>That is what happened Tuesday night, and that is why we wake up to a different country. Yes, the struggle for equality is never done. But we can start afresh now from a whole new baseline. Let every child and every citizen and every new immigrant know that from this day forward: Everything really <em>is <\/em>possible in America.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;Thomas Friedman, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/11\/05\/opinion\/05friedman.html?_r=1&#038;oref=slogin&#038;pagewanted=all\">Finishing Our Work<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s not looking so good for Prop 8 and Prop 4 here in California, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the first time in eight years, I feel hopeful about the future of our country. I am thrilled with the historic presidential election results. In his famous Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln urged every American to take on &#8220;the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far nobly advanced.&#8221; That work remained unfinished, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,16,29,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-nature","category-regional","category-social-science"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2989"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11648,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2989\/revisions\/11648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}