I watched Obama’s Cairo speech this morning. It was a hope-inspiring way to start my day. As many of them did, this passage moved me deeply:

“Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.”

A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

~ Albert Camus

It does not matter how slow you go so long as you do not stop.

~ Confucius

“That thankfully our founders were wise enough to say we have this position and it’s constitutional — vice president will be able to be not only the position flexible.”

~ Sarah Palin

It seems as though Ken never stops walking. We see him every time we walk the beach – and we walk at all hours of the day.

Tall, tanned, well-groomed and always wearing shorts despite the weather, he strides along the 2.2 kilometer promenade with the air of a man on his way to somewhere important. As the ever-present gulls hover overhead, we say “Good Morning” or “Good Afternoon” and Ken returns the greeting briskly in a british-tinged accent. Sometimes we just nod. Sometimes we raise a hand in a casual, regular-beachwalker salute.

This morning was cool, grey and threatening rain. Debbie and I wore sweaters, jackets and, in my case, a knit hat. Ken was wearing his shorts, as usual. We never talk, but each time I see him I’m reminded, as I was this morning, of the night the three of us sat, as strangers, in the White Rock city council chambers with a group of concerned and angry citizens. (continue reading this post …)

Got a few minutes? This is Barack Obama speaking in Reno Nevada the day after the ‘Wall Street’ bailout was rejected and the stock market plummeted.

UPDATE: And This is New Yorker Magazine’s endorsement – an extremely comprehensive overview.