No matter who you voted for or what your expectations are for Barack Obama’s presidency, today is a great day for America. Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal:

And this has grown old, and maybe it’s the last time to say it, history moving so fast, but there’s something we all know so well that we are perhaps forgetting to see it in the forefront. But a long-oppressed people have raised up a president. It is moving and beautiful and speaks to the unending magic and sense of justice of our country. The other day the journalist John O’Sullivan noted that 150 years after slavery, a black man stands in the place of Lincoln in the inaugural stands, and this country has proved again that anything is possible, that if we can do this we can do anything. That is a good thing to remember at a difficult time.

A lot of people thought they would never live to see this day, and were wrong. The future came faster than expected. It tends to do that, which is why I’m a little disturbed by Colin Powell’s remarks on the inauguration in light of the celebration of MLK day

Even with Barack Obama’s election as President, Powell also talked about not letting King’s dream die.

“He would never rest. He would never be satisfied. He would still be beating that drum,” Powell told the crowd.

Sorry, I have to take issue with the word “never.” If Powell just meant that Dr. King would “still not be satisfied,” then I can certainly see that. But to say that he would “never” be satisfied is to argue that a satisfactory resolution of race relations in this country is not achievable, that it lies perpetually out there somewhere beyond the horizon.

On the most recent FastForwad Radio, we discussed a potential coming Utopia. I argued that Utopias are achievable but that they are always relative and that they don’t seem like “Utopia” to the people who live there. The reason is that by “Utopia,” we tend to mean a future in which no more problems exist. That probably can’t happen. Completely solve any of the world’s major problems — poverty, disease, war — and you will still have a world in which problems exist. The people who live in that world, though far better off than we are, will still believe that they have difficult lives, filled with dangers and risks.

But in his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. King did not describe a world in which all problems are solved. He described a world in which one major, complex, ugly, and seemingly unsolvable problem was eliminated. The power of the speech is predicated on the idea that somehow, maybe, someday, the dream will come true. If he had prefaced his remarks with the words “Now, of course, none of this will ever happen, but…” how effective would that speech have been?

Believing the future we want is possible is a major contributing factor in how we bring it about. We must be careful about how we throw that word “never” around.