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"It takes a movement to get it. This wasn't just a campaign, this was a movement." That's April Stoltz, lifelong community activist and member of the Lakewood Democratic Club. Though filled with pride and hope for a new dawn in American leadership, Stoltz remains cautious. "The movement has to continue." Indeed, Stoltz and President Elect Barak Obama hold a shared belief in the power of community organizing, the power of a people to remake a nation. Obama's character and charisma have inspired citizens throughout the nation to come together in the creative act of community building. In this, Obama has perhaps set the fundamental precedent that could lead to his success in office: the re-engagement of the American citizen in the work of rebuilding a nation. As Stoltz sees it,"[Obama] has a critical mass to do what he wants to do. Not only does he have charisma, he cut his teeth on community organizing."

With a national economy in free fall, two seemingly unwinnable wars in the Middle East, and leadership scandals unfolding across all sectors of American life, it's hard not to cast wishes for the "Good 'ol Days," warm apple pie, general peace and the spoils of empire. But don't give up on America just yet, calls Obama and community activists throughout the nation, and indeed, the world.

Few disagree that our nation now faces monumental challenges. According to economist and social commentator Robert Kuttner, the financial collapse signals a "Teachable Moment" with accumulated political capital for a re-regulation of markets, trade and industry. In his book Obama's Challenge: An Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency, Kuttner notes that there are "large economic policy areas crying out for dramatic changes… in the realms of regulation, trade, labor, and global energy and environment policy… President Obama will need to break with the bipartisan conventions of extreme financial deregulation, which led to the subprime crisis, the credit crunch, the slide in housing values, and the weakening of bank balance sheets…"

Kuttner argues that despite an escalating national debt built of widening budget deficits, Obama's administration should increase deficit spending to rebuild national infrastructure in a New Deal for a new generation. He notes the importance of understanding deficit spending in terms of the GDP. During the early years of the New Deal, deficit spending hovered between 4 and 6 percent, an amount not large enough to lift the nation out of the Great Depression. With the onset of WWII, this figure skyrocketed to 30 percent. "We are not in another Great Depression and we don't need a recovery program on the scale of WWII. But we do need increased deficits," writes Kuttner.

Though incremental, such a national shift from a destructive market cycle driven by growing financial distress and institutional corruption to an honest engagement with the dynamism of markets and a plan for their constructive, creative, and nation building use amounts to nothing less than an historic transition from an old order to something new. But the new order, should it come to fruition, is at this point just a dream, an ideal. As Stoltz and Obama warn, the public must demand, and in fact command, this new direction. And it's not yet clear if our new president will orient himself toward the more radical cries for a new New Deal. Only time will tell.

But in Lakewood, it is clear that the next generation of American leadership has heard the call, many having taken on leadership roles before Barak Obama was even a household name, let alone a serious presidential contender. From the Lakewood Democratic Club, the Lakewood Observer, LEAF, LIA, MAMA, to city council and city hall, younger generations of active Lakewood citizens are taking the reins of community leadership.

"Obama and this election coincide with a change that empowers regular citizens to own a piece of their country and their community," notes Tom Bullock, Lakewood's youngest elected official and president of the Lakewood Democratic Club. "In the old days only people seeking patronage jobs got involved. Or perhaps your boss told you that you had to spend a day at pole."

Election 2008 marks an historic transition from that patronage tinted grassroots tribalism to a more expansive arena of popular activism, firmly rooted in the local. "With Obama, thousands of people spent their free time… they jumped in and said 'we're taking this back.' What's new is the level and degree of their organization." Bullock notes that the internet and new tools "made it possible for Obama to get donations from over 3 million small donors efficiently.” This changes everything.

For Bullock, the Obama victory signals something deeper, an interior experience not unlike listening to a heart moving song. Deep within the hearts of all Americans, there's a yearning for a better day, towards hope, change and a new community standard of decency. "When Obama touches on this in his oratory, he's evoking it in all of us. It's kind of like a player who plums a string, we all experience the humming in ourselves."

Either Obama is playing us like a great chorus of fiddles, or we're participating in an energetic exchange that might inspire a rebirth of the United States. If Lakewood is any indication of that direction, the hope seems real and grounded in the lived experience of many a campaign worker and community activist.

"We saw this very thing flower in Lakewood. Because Lakewood is a front porch town, a street car community, it works especially well in Lakewood. You had people who were neighbors but not friends who were all of a sudden working together in the trenches. They bonded. They made history. This was a searing rite of passage for people who didn't believe it was possible. They have committed and delivered the goods," states Bullock, with conviction. That's transformation. That's the antidote to anomie.

President Elect Barak Obama's campaign was powered by nothing less than the most grassroots movement in recent history.

"Yes We Can." The eerily prophetic chant now echoes across an America torn by crisis. That we've been heading in this direction for at least a decade is now undeniable. According to the New York Times, "2.3 million Americans have been out of work for six months or more, a level of long term joblessness not seen in the early stages of any recession since World War II." The period of American history beginning with the Great Depression and ending with the victory in WWII was a dark time which imposed great challenges, external demands for heroic action, on an entire generation of young Americans. The work of rebuilding a nation and conquering a distant enemy went hand in hand. Both demanded an immeasurable degree of sacrifice on the part of a generation of Americans whom we've come to know as the Greatest Generation, the Heroic Generation.

In The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny, published in 1997, generational scholars William Strauss and Neil Howe predicted that "Sometime around the year 2005, perhaps a few years before or after, America will enter a Fourth Turning." For Strauss and Howe, a Fourth Turning represents the breakdown and possible failure of an established order, a breakdown which results from the erosion of systems economic, social and cultural. It's the final stage in a recurrent four-fold generational cycle which can be located and tracked throughout the history of American society since its early settlement some half a millennium ago.

A Fourth Turning is a time of crises, when doing more of the same is no longer an option, when the challenges of the present can no longer be resolved nor buried by the once reliable systems of the past. They are eroding. In the best of times, the crisis catalyzes action. At worst, it christens the fall of a nation.

With a keen sense of the future grounded in a solid historical understanding of American society, Strauss and Howe suggest that "the catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic… An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way." Four years before 9/11, before military campaigns in the Middle East, and eleven years before the modern financial crisis, Strauss and Howe identify the general direction toward total Crisis and the dynamic factors accelerating that procession.

"Soon after the catalyst, a national election will produce a sweeping political realignment, as one faction or coalition capitalizes on a new public demand for decisive action… The winners will now have the power to pursue the more potent, less incrementalist agenda about which they had long dreamed and against which their adversaries had darkly warned. This new regime will enthrone itself for the duration of the Crisis. Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice."

The hope for change, that deep-seated longing for transformation that is uniquely American is once again rising within the nation's spirit. Hope. Change. Yes We Can. The power of words, when spoken with grace and conviction, can bring people together and mobilize action. Lakewood Democrats and Independent supporters felt that call to duty and helped to deliver the county and state to Obama. In the process a new economy is already emerging, one concerned more with the accumulation of social capital and healthy relationships than financial capitalization.

According to sociologist Frank Hearn, social capital is the bedrock upon which all modern democracies must rest. In Moral Order and Social Disorder, Hearn explains that "Dignity… depends less on the assertion of rights and duties than on the presence of people who care and are attentive to the needs of others. For the moral person, the coherence of the social world rests on the fulfillment of responsibilities bestowed by relationships, not on adherence to abstract principles; and morality requires the development of those qualities that sensitize people to, and encourage them to meet, these responsibilities, not the development of cognitive complexity."

In his penetrating analysis of the philosophical dilemma underpinning symptomatic civic dysfunction in the United States Hearn repositions the questions of Moral Order and Social Disorder well beyond the right-left paradigm. In doing so, he moves the abstract, and indeed cold world of traditional political philosophy and strategy back into the realm of the heart. It is here where once anonymous neighbors bond in the trenches of nation building, where a presidential hopeful can appeal to our higher angels, and where we will always return for renewal, personal and civic. It's the personal heart, the hearth of the home, and the intangible center of all healthy communities.

According to president elect Barak Obama, "It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day." Let us begin this work today, right here in Lakewood, Ohio.