Guided a bus tour for Drinking Liberally (a local chapter of a national political group) which regularly meets to debate current events ... .

...and it was while standing is the gaping expanse of the cathedral-like Craneway of the iconic Ford Building that I felt the impact of revelation:

If the visionaries of my generation could enable us to abruptly disassemble the auto industry under the eminent threat of war -- and tool up to transform itself from auto manufacturing to tank assembling, and shipbuilding, and then create an aircraft industry from scratch in the matter of months -- what's so difficult about creating a green economy based on alternative energy sources now?

All it took in 1941 was a nation willing and prepared by courageous leadership to sacrifice for the good of the all. We did without, gave up everyday items, dealt with rationing of the essentials, grew our own food, even walked when petroleum was needed for the war effort.

Found myself wondering as I fell asleep last night if President Obama isn't looking at more than the Franklin Delano Roosevelt regulatory policies for guidance, but as much at the leadership style that inspired those kinds of sacrifices in we the people who bought in despite a discriminatory social system that could easily have cost us the national will to prevail in a disastrous war that saved us from totalitarian world domination. Perhaps political partisanship will be the hurdle to be overcome in our time ... but we may have the kind of leadership that can overcome that, I believe. This may be what's behind the president's insistence upon erasing those lines that divide us; red from blue, liberal from conservative, Democrat from Republican. American lives as well as the lives of the entire planet may well depend upon his ability to accomplish that.

I realized again while guiding yesterday's tour that this park is vitally important to helping this generation to shape its response to precipitous climate change. The models for the mobilization lie in the WWII Home Front story. They exist to tell the world that that kind of monumental change is not only possible but that we've already done it. That the models are here to see and that therein lies the hope for the future that we're so desperately seeking in order to meet the new and daunting challenges to life as we know it here on the planet we call home.

Could hardly sleep last night as my mind raced back over the day in the search for the tomorrow that is always tucked into the kaleidoscopic re-run that prepares me to face each succeeding day.