Disheartened, heartened

Two posts that both capture some truth about the mixed feel of our current times -- brimming with hope for change and healing, painfully aware of the grim legacy of the last eight years, uncertain which to hold onto. Somehow, I'm happier to blog them together than separately.

First, from Rafe, a post titled How America discarded its moral compass, which tracks our increasing comfort with our national maltreatment of our detainees. It concludes,

It’s only now that I’m really seeing the degree to which the things that I really do cherish about America have been debased. Everybody knows that the government has abandoned the values of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence when it was expedient over the years, but it’s only in recent times that we see such widespread belief that it’s not even wrong to do so.

Then, from Bitch, Ph.D., a reaction to the nomination of Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and its reaffirmation of the American promise of possibility for all:

When the President, a Hawaiian-born black man from a broken home, nominates a Bronx-born Puerto Rican woman to the Supreme Court, you can't help but feel like maybe the Constitution and the Separation of Powers and Equality Under the Law and We the People and all that stuff really, actually, might be true.

Yeah, let's hope that some of that stuff might hold up after all . . .