The glass is half full.

Let's lead off with some good stuff from Billy Reed: It’s a Hopeful Morning in America (billyreedsays.com). It's easy for cynics like me to be pessimistic. Today, optimism is merited.

Barack Obama’s inauguration is underway, and for me his presidency stands to be deeply symbolic, if not for all the reasons it will be for so many others.

The presidential election results in 2004 induced a deep personal depression, but ultimately the disaster of Dubya's second term for Dubya – “disaster” perhaps being far too mild a term to describe the four years since – convinced me to put my interest in national political affairs on ice, and to look around my own neighborhood for a place where my principled involvement just might bear fruit.

Considering how much I didn’t know about local affairs four years ago, the experience has been akin to studying for a second university degree, and yet, I feel like 've made a difference, albeit small, and more importantly, found more kindred spirits than I imagined existed, who've also helped establish the groundwork for local change by becoming part of the process.

And make no mistake: You're part of the process. Don't listen to the Gahans and Coffeys and Kocherts when they insist that running for office is the only way to make a difference. They're whistling past graveyards of their own making - out of tune, no less.

Your very existence is a counterweight to petty political games played by ward heelers. They've won a few rounds, but so have you. It's sad to consider that we all should be participating together, but the decision to polarize the community has been made by a small number of persons who make no bones about protecting the little they know and have at the expense of the greater good. Posterity will judge them harshly for it.

Speaking again for myself, without listening and learning and involvement, here at the blog and out on the street, there wouldn’t be a brewery expansion project underway. I wouldn’t have an understanding, however fragmentary it remains, of all the mechanisms that go into efforts such as facilitating downtown revitalization -- my personal dream in all this.

And, tragically, how difficult it is to purge the demons of a discredited past, those personages entirely unable to contribute in any useful fashion to the future hope, but manage to retain an effective veto against the uphill climb for the sole reason of their willingness to take advantage of the less fortunate to assuage their own bitterness and instability.

We’ve made impressive gains these past four years, but what happened at last week’s city council meeting vividly illustrates how far we have to travel in our own community, a significant portion of which remains hidebound, ignorant and frightened. Too many opportunists among us are eager to prey on these sad weaknesses, but today, I’m an optimist. America as a whole did it with its embrace of change in the form of Obama, and so can we.

Even Dan Coffey cannot stand in the path of the future forever.

There’ll be time enough to reflect in greater depth on these themes. For now, to those of you reading who were dismayed by last Thursday's abuses, I want to offer encouragement. The battle’s just starting. If I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t be investing in downtown. We’ll have to work harder, and work smarter.

Given the lowest-common-denominator propensities of the dead weight clinging to our legs, that shouldn’t be altogether difficult, should it?