I’ve voted for a major presidential candidate once – Kerry – because the Bush team was so dangerous, and I always know the people I normally voted for had no prayer of winning (Nader, Commoner, etc). I am 54 years old, and have been organizing since I was 15, when I first started educating about Vietnam, apartheid and environment. With the Obama campaign, I sense someone who might have the leadership tools and perception to talk more into our whole ‘community’ with its needs, instead of the false claim of speaking for Americans when they speak in fact for small segments of this nation.My original enthusiasm is being tempered as I watch the election cycle move through its calendar, and the campaigns enter into this ridiculous tit-for-tat name-calling and exaggeration of positions and meanings. Now the news is sitting and waiting for attack and counter-attack, egging spokespersons and candidates on, hoping to get some sparks flying and fur singeing, because media lives off conflict. And, because focus groups somewhere show that we have to respond to attacks, the campaign does, with ‘tough talk’ and all the crap of political theater that so turns off so many Americans who don’t participate in this decayed democracy, myself included. Is there some camp one goes to where one learns counter-attack as exaggeration and hyperbole? Is it a criteria for being involved in political campaigns? Don’t say what is real and necessary but say what is needed to make the other people seem like some evil ‘they?’On the side of every cigarette box, there is a warning that cigarette smoking kills, and being human beings driven by all of our quirks, fears, and inadequacies, as well as hopes, dreams and compassion, many people still smoke – i.e., truth does not necessarily set you free. One has to be looking for a ‘truth’ for it to be meaningful enough to provide a path of freedom. When we reduce politics to this process of skirmishing and conflict, exaggeration and attempt to demonize the ‘other,’ we make almost impossible for many people a search for a path of ‘truths’ that will help set them and their communities, free of the issues that befall them. Rather than give them truth, we give them theater, we give them titillation, we give them adrenalin and snickering…but we don’t give them ‘truths’ to help set them free to unleash the gift of their lives in communal action on pressing life and community issues.The American voter needs a ton of education on increasingly complex issues that keep getting reduced to sound-bites and slogans. I sense that Obama, with community activist roots, has a perception of what people are capable of doing in addressing their communal needs when given the tools to do so. But I fear that ultimately, the temptation is to react when one is dissed, instead of respond. After a lifetime of seeing the two parties as two sides of the same coin, it is refreshing to feel like there is a candidate who might bring something different.
I hope I am right.
