It's reassuring to see that America's youth are very involved politically, rather than merely self indulgent, and even more so that in spite of the debacle of the Bush years, they have not been paralyzed by cynicism
Call Me Naive: A Love Letter
The Brooklyn Rail
....My mom grew up Jewish among Jews; my dad Italian among Italians; and I grew up an Italian-Jewish kid with little connection to either heritage, ...
I know I’m supposed to be cynical about Barack Obama. The political process is broken, the cynics say, crushed by three decades of Republican rule, undermined by a stupefied—or stupid-fried—electorate, and sabotaged by a media industrial complex the likes of which Dwight Eisenhower could never have imagined.
The naysayers tell me that Barack Obama is just another politician, motivated by ego, programmed to manipulate. “Change,” they scoff, is simply another slogan cooked up by the politicos in Washington and the greed-is-good guys on Wall Street, and Obama is as beholden to special interests as George W. Bush. Even if he does manage to convince the American people to overcome hundreds of years of ingrained racism to elect him, what will he really do?
There is some truth to this, of course. The system is broken—not least, in my view, because of the so-called Chattering Class, those venal, egomaniacal babblers who occupy cable television; ostensibly watchdogs of our government, they are actually daily betrayers of the public trust—and Obama is most certainly a politician.
Even so, I believe in him. And to explain why, ........
Call me naïve. But two years ago, Barack Obama came to speak in my high-school gym, the same gym from the Martin Luther King Day assembly. (I had long since graduated, but my brother was a student there now). At the time, Obama was the junior senator from the state of Illinois, and he had come to support his colleague, Maria Cantwell (and also, I suspect, to dip his toe into the mucky waters of presidential campaigning). In 2003, Cantwell had famously voted to authorize military action against Iraq, and there was a prickly contingent of anti-Cantwell folk in attendance. As Obama began to speak, his baritone voice rumbling over the packed crowd, the protesters started to squirm and squawk from the sidelines. Soon, he couldn’t finish a sentence.
And so he began to speak directly to the people who had come to mock him. He spoke in a voice filled with respect and sadness, and also a kind of cautious optimism. It was an expansive voice, encompassing both the sniping of the protesters and the good will of his supporters—not a drowning out, but a bringing in. It was a voice that spoke to that same joy I felt standing in those bleachers as a freshman, to that gratitude of inclusion—and to the pain I experienced as an outsider with my head in the woodchips. It addressed the paralyzing disappointment I felt when Bush was reelected. It wasn’t so much a voice as a signal, a signal that it was all right to care again, to consider the future of our society. To harness that awesome power.
If Barack Obama is elected president, he will no doubt, in certain regards, be just another politician. I may be naïve, but I can acknowledge this much. Politics is a game of compromise and navigation, and the president has only so much power to control policy. Things will not just magically get better.
But the election of Barack Obama is not about a new array of policy positions. It is not about the Iraq War or our plunging economy, though there is little doubt he will work toward troop withdrawal, establishing a national healthcare system, and a framework for green energy.
The election of Barack Obama instead would be a signal to all of us in this country who are tempted by cynicism and by nihilism, those of us prone to half-hearted criticism and full-hearted despair, that while now is the time to shift the government’s course, it’s also an opportunity for a more important kind of change—in our attitudes towards each other.
Call me naïve, but the election of Barack Obama would be a signal that we are remembering how to love.
Alex Gallo-Brown is a Seattleite living in Brooklyn.
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