Some thoughts following Obama’s talk at the Republican retreat, and the State of the Union Address.
Once again I feel like everything might be all right in the United States. Well, ok, I won’t go that far, but I feel that I got a glimpse again last night of what has the power and potential to pull us through, if anything is going to do it.
Of course, I’m talking about Love.
In his state of the Union address, Obama answered a question I’ve been wanting to ask him for a year now: what keeps him going in the face of the shitstorm he wakes up to every day? He said, in a nutshell, that it’s his belief in and experience with the basic decency of Americans. (I don’t think he meant just Americans – in context he was implicating a more fundamental human quality, what has often been called “basic human goodness.”)
I remember this experience myself, walking door-to-door in political campaigns; every day I came away from it electrified with excitement, just by hearing people’s stories and finding that they are fundamentally just like me, regardless of their opinions and ideologies. Everyone wants to feel like they are doing the right thing. (Even teenagers rebelling by doing the “wrong” thing are doing it because they feel that the “right” thing no longer holds the high ground.) Nobody, save a psychopath, wants to see, or be the source of, another’s suffering. On a more immediate level, almost everyone is cordial to some degree, and will smile or laugh at a joke, and will try to be kind to a stranger. Of course on my walks I met with some rudeness, shortness, and even threats (one fellow, with Fox News blaring from a big screen TV behind him, said “Get out of here or I’m gonna harass you!”) But the overall experience of human warmth made it clear to me that rudeness or violence is some sort of overlay or learned behavior – not essential to who we are as human beings. Even the threatening fellow above didn’t seem to have his heart in it. He was an elder who at first had a fatherly look and air to him, and his rudeness only came out when I told him I was canvassing in opposition to the Bush Administration, and his response sounded like a script he had prepared for just such a meeting. From the quality of character I sensed in him, I can easily imagine him regretting his behavior later.
I too have felt alarmed at what seems like a growing rudeness, and even violence, in Americans who are socially and/or geographically entrenched in right-wing ideologies. Of course I’m concerned about people living in isolated communities where they are saturated with hateful talk radio and right-wing “news,” and have no access to independent sources of information and ideas. I’ve gotten rude looks and treatment from these folks in truck stops and rest stops all across Middle America. But like I said above, I have faith that it’s a surface meanness, and that its source is the illness that Obama addressed in his televised talk with Republicans last week.
Going back, briefly, to the state of the Union address, one thing that struck me was hearing the President itemizing the progressive legislation that has actually been pushed through under his Administration. I had not heard of most of this, because my own sources of “progressive,” “alternative,” and “independent” news only report what’s wrong, supplemented only by one brilliantly-written and scathing op-ed after another on “how Barack Obama and the Democrats have failed the progressive cause.” And of course, one can’t expect the corporate-owned mainstream “news” that blares from every TV and headline to report anything positive – it seems the whole role of these outlets is to foment hopelessness.
I’m of course not saying we should sugarcoat what’s going on in the world, or ever cease our healthy critique of policy and politics. And I have my own deepening doubts that much can be done within our behemoth system to bring about the changes we need to urgent problems such as climate change and the ongoing wars; more and more, I’m looking to movements that circumvent the electoral and bureaucratic system and take matters positively and proactively into our own hands on a local level, such as green living choices. But Barack Obama has been giving us, over and over, a message that we can take as deeply and apply as broadly as we want to go with it, and the deeper, broader and sooner the better. Our problems are not so much in our disagreements on policy or ideology, religion, or lifestyle; these differences, according to the classic Liberal, pluralist model that Obama heartedly embraces, are inescapable in a democracy. Our problem could be introduced, in a word, as divisiveness, though there’s more nuance to it than the word implies. And this problem not only reeks in the outright ultra-conservative bile of Fox News, it is also perhaps more invidiously sleeping beneath the constant negativity of progressive news sources like Common Dreams. It is at the heart of my own feeling of being under-informed as I watched the State of the Union Address.
What is it that inspired me in the President’s televised meeting with the Republicans? Of course I’m as dazzled as ever by Obama’s stunning intelligence, confidence, mastery, humor and grace under fire. (Can you even begin to imagine Bush in the same situation, with the Democrats?) And these qualities are in no small part related to what really blew me away: the way he repeatedly drew attention to the debilitating divisiveness of both parties, and his explanation of the deleterious effect of politically-motivated attacks and negativity on the ability to get any actual work done in Washington. That it paralyses the legislative process, now and for the future. And he let the speakers in the actual question-and-answer section provide living examples of the kind of paralyzing language and behavior that he was talking about.
Like I said, it’s Love. Love doesn’t write off someone as not worth talking to. Love doesn’t consider another human being as inferior. Love “believes all things, bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (Oh, no… did I just quote the Bible? Well, there’s another unification project we need to talk about, mm-kay?) When, after almost an hour of difficult questions, the moderator implied that he would be willing to cut the last questions off because the meeting was going over time, Barack said, “I’m havin’ fun!” I truly believe it. I think that man is so grounded in his belief in the basic worthiness of all human beings, including sleazy politicos out to destroy him, that he is impervious to their blows as long as he’s actively driving his message home and working at the project of mending our divided Union. The more they tried to slime him, the more they proved his point. And he’s standing on the rock of his faith American Liberalism, and the Constitution. And he’s smart and studied as hell. And I think he’s rising to the occasion every minute he’s in there.
Yes, despite the ugly decisions he’s made in the last year, I’m still proud, and humbled, and I’m still blown away.
