Column by Richard Becker

Times are tough. In my life, I recently had to apply for federal student aid for the first time in my college career. I have had the protective bubble of suburban prosperity in which I have been fortunate to live for so long finally pierced by the confluence of negative circumstances that have created the perfect storm of our current financial and economic crisis.

I write today from the road, as I travel from Kentucky up through the hills of West Virginia on into Maryland to Washington, D.C. to watch Barack Obama be inaugurated as our 44th president. It is a bittersweet event, as the carefree days of the campaign finally and definitively come to an end and the real work of governing in tough times begins.

As I wrote last week, I don’t feel ­that President Obama offers a panacea to the myriad problems our country faces, but to paraphrase the man himself, we must have hope in hard times.

History provides a relevant example by which we may measure both our current situation and the ease with which we might hope to bring ourselves up and out of it.

It has, by now, become clichéd to compare Obama to two other great presidents who faced difficulties that would have crippled lesser men, and indeed to do so would needlessly inflate expectations. Yet the examples of the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln are telling.

The former assumed office amidst a time of great domestic turmoil, with a crash in the stock market, rampant runs on the banks, and even suggestion among some that the time had come for dictatorial leadership in Washington. It is said that shortly after taking office, Roosevelt was in his office contemplating the road ahead, his son Jimmy seated by his side; the president turned to his son and said, “I’m … afraid that I may not have the strength to do this job. After you leave me tonight, Jimmy, I am going to pray. I am going to pray that God will help me, that he will give me the strength and the guidance to do this job and to do it right. I hope that you will pray for me, too, Jimmy.”

Roosevelt’s presidency was ultimately a transformative one, forever changing the relationship between the polity and the government and redefining the rules of the game in our capitalist experiment.

Similarly, Lincoln took office as the United States sat on the brink of Civil War, the long-simmering tensions between North and South coming to a full boil in the early 1860’s. Lincoln could easily have ceded the office to another man and foregone the immense stress of holding together a deeply fractured people. Yet Lincoln did no such thing; he summoned the courage and the wisdom to lead America through four of the bloodiest years in U.S. history, for the sake of the ultimate reunion of North and South in relative amicability.

So while times are tough, we must remind ourselves that we have risen above adversity as a country before and become better for it. The same is possible now. Yesterday, our new president laid out his vision for a renewal of America. Now it is our job to see it through.