Senator Obama’s speech is a watershed in American history.

It is the beginning of the end of race as a front-and-center issue in assessing a person’s suitability for office.  But it is so much more.

Senator Obama illuminates the power — logically, personally, movingly — of living a life that acknowledges pain but moves on from it.  He teaches us how to discern between blind loyalty and loving friendship.  He shows the worthiness of tying each American’s journey, whatever his or her ethnic background, to the whole of the American community. 

Race never should have been a divisive aspect of our national dialog.  It should have been a quality used to demonstrate the landmark nature of our national call to action, as articulated in our founding documents. 

How appropriate that the senator delivered this speech in Philadelphia, where patriots of another age set down the most remarkable set of tenets ever articulated for self government.  With this message, the senator from Illinois reaches into those tenets to put any rationale for racial division to rest.  He has shown us that his legacy is our legacy, through anecdotes that could be from my story or your story, via a logic stream that only a rare mind can conceive.

I am grateful that this man has appeared in this time.  Whether or not he is the next American president, his capacity to lead through healing as well as mightiness will be of great value to us all.  The world will be better than he found it.