President Obama

My wife and were among the millions who watched the inauguration via live video stream on the Web. We never watch television and were unable to figure out how to get a broadcast signal on our new TV; but the set was hooked up to Stacey's laptop and we picked up a great stream from MSNBC. I was working from home that day, but admittedly didn't get much done for a couple hours during the height of the festivities. (Don't worry, I did work several hours into the evening to make up for the lost time.)

The enormity of the crowds was amazing, even as viewed on a TV screen. It was a great moment for my country, a chance to regain some of the reputation that we had in our best years--and possibly even to better live up to that reputation than we did then.

Since that historic day, the words have sounded like music every time I have heard them in the media: President Obama. It represents the passing of the torch to a new generation, my generation, a generation that, as a whole, has experienced a broader world than even the boomers that preceded us. Howe and Strauss call us the Thirteenth Generation and define birth years 1961 to 1981. As a whole, we're a generation that has experienced complexity to a degree that our forbears have not.

Mr. Obama represents our generation well. Far more Thirteeners have multi-ethnic backgrounds, blended families, and a history of living in multiple, diverse locations than any preceding generation. Most of the people I work with at a large technology company are Thirteeners, and they are a diverse bunch.

It's a generation that wants to move beyond partisan politics, yet has a definite progressive philosophy on human rights, warfare, the economy, and poverty. We favor civil unions for the LGBT community, and the Millennials (born after 1982) are starting to pull our generation in the direction of favoring gay marriage.

The Millennials and Thirteeners cheered the loudest when President Obama issued his first executive orders:

• Closing Guantanamo Bay and banning torture, with the explanation that our values and our safety cannot be put at cross purposes.
• Championing disclosure and open government and restricting the influence of lobbyists, with the warning that secrecy for secrecy's sake will not be tolerated.
• Drawing up plans to end the senseless, expensive, and oppressive war in Iraq, ending a boondoggle that extremely conservative estimates show 90,000 lives lost and almost $600 billion spent (not counting interest and ongoing costs of reprovisioning, medical care, and rebuilding--which will bring the cost to several trillion dollars).

I won't agree with everything Obama does, but his spiritual presence will be a welcome change from a decidedly unspiritual administration that has left office. Religious, yes, but not spiritual. That's another characteristic of my generation: we tend to count spirituality as more important than religion. Not too different from another reformer in another era, Jesus of Nazareth.