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I just knew it – it had to happen sooner or later. My hero, B.O., just appointed Tom Vilsack—an outspoken proponent of big agro business and bio-engineering—to Secretary for Agriculture. Help! The lobbying in Washington to prevent him from getting into office is already under way, and 20,000 signatures have been sent directly to the transition team. Yet, in the midst of it all I can just recognize, in the more lucid neurons of my liberal environmentalist brain, the ‘us and them’ mentality we were all lamenting so much before and during the election creeping in again—the divided America.

And there is more. Another e-mail alarm reached my inbox: “The road-building lobby is trying to convince the incoming administration that building roads should be part of the stimulus package that gets the economy back on track”… So those guys are at it again as well……

Reading all this I feel like I am breathing again the acidic atmosphere of righteous activism versus the corrupt establishment while at the same time knowing perfectly well that there really are forces and powers out there whose only interest is to maintain just that, power.

So what were we—or was I—hearing and thinking when Obama spoke about moving forward as One Nation? One Nation. Does that mean everyone would think and do as I like it? Is Monsanto part of that nation? Are cloned cows and bio-engineered corn?

Then there was proposition 8—the Californian outcry about blacks and Hispanics who voted for Obama and at the same time, voted down gays’ right to marry. How could they? They of all people should know about discrimination, shouldn’t they? But history has hardly ever worked like that. And looking more closely, it actually makes sense that these groups, whose strongest support in building a decent life has been their belief in God and the community of the churches, would vote that way.

In one sense, there are just about as many perceptions of Obama as there are groups of voters who elected him. Yet, in another, the fundamental drive behind the election – the realization that government can and should be working in a wholesome way, that the country is founded on a constitution unrivaled in the world in the way it honors human being’s capacity to develop and flourish and the tremendous significance of it not just for the country, but for the world as a whole—was the same for all of us who celebrated Nov 4th as a new beginning.

Obama’s agenda was less about specific policies than it was about hope, and I am beginning to understand the significance of that more clearly. Because the hope is that we can come together to evolve, from exactly where we are, respecting our vastly different life circumstances.

This context of trust and renewal provides the enormous opportunity to learn that change means different things for different people, and that in order for the whole to move forward, not everything is going to go my way. It sounds simple, but it means a lot and unless we understand that point, we will dig our own grave in the morass of self-righteous frustration and indignation that is coloring some of the blogs these days. Everyone, truly everyone, has something to complain about.

So I need to do the unspeakable and make room for the possibility that we might make strides towards more bio-engineering. We have the technology, so we will do it. It always works this way—with the first aeroplane, the first vaccine, the first heart-transplant—this is humanity making sure it survives.

Maybe what is less important than the technology itself is the intention and moral maturity of the people who use it. Do we just have our own self-interest in mind or do we genuinely care about the greater good and the highest priority? And that question points the finger directly at myself, implicating me to undertake an inquiry that is more demanding, more painful and way more exciting than any particular piece of policy.