Organizing for America | The Good Fight: A Time to Nourish Ourselves with the Hot Interplay of Ideas

A Time to Nourish Ourselves with the Hot Interplay of Ideas

By Joseph - Jan 7th, 2009 at 2:55 pm EST

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I grew up being educated about why ours was the most hopeful system, because it was under the sway of human decency, common sense and imagination, and not the urges of the powerful. Between a Catholic school —the lessons of which resonate with me more as philosophy, the quest for understanding and fellowship and an ethical approach to citizenship— and a family of Republicans —the strictures of which resonate more in me as a lesson about the virtues and the pitfalls of caution and the vice and convenience of a narrow focus—, I came to understand that American democracy was an epic struggle against history, in hopes of bettering the condition of the individual human being, and securing a just and open society against tyranny and its wasting of vital energies.

I had never felt like a political being, as a child, though my grandfather held office in New Jersey and my upbringing did instill in me a lasting social consciousness. I can recall the feeling of a thrill running through me when I saw in Bill Clinton a president who worked for the people, with committed intellectual passion, and who included us, or made an effort to appear to count the people as part of the work of governing. Maybe it was the first real instance of the Democratic approach my young consciousness had been able to witness, and the experience helped to fix a meditative, philosophical mind, interested in ecology and the possibility of justice in human society, on a set of values in political action: defend the defenseless, struggle against oppressors, and let each person choose the best life possible, which should, ideally, entail the chance to build that life from one's own vision and energies.

It had never seemed clear to me that freedom implied a negation of the ethical bond to others, and it worried me that so many genuinely radical principles, negating the social contract on which I think all successful democracies are based, were taking root as the latter Bush rose from obscurity, heading into the 2000 campaign. I think it is hardly an original observation to note that between the procedural fiasco of the 2000 election and the first year of George W. Bush's presidency, it was as if we had been nudged by some remorseless antagonistic force into a twilight-zone America, where all the dark projections that we were taught to associate with the fear of Soviet world dominance, were becoming pet projects of mainstream agencies in our government. "Total Information Awareness" and the "USA PATRIOT Act" were just two examples. The Constitution was becoming the adversary, a suspicious, revolutionary text that would only serve to dilute the power of the new set of arrogant hands urging the wheel of state away from what we used to proudly call the common values of American democracy.

In the year 2000, Al Gore made a desperately difficult choice, and opted to withdraw from remaining avenues of contest and support the integrity of the Constitutional system, by honoring the verdict of the Supreme Court with regard to Florida. Instead of further legal challenges or calling for the impeachment of one or more Justices, instead of calling his supporters into the streets, Gore bet on the virtues of process and carried out his duties, counting the votes of Florida for his opponent. It was an act of devotion to the fragility of the democratic process, and to the faith that the rule of law and the government by the people, would prevail, in time.

I think in many ways, I was drawn into poetry, philosophy and my love of language, by the degree of poetry and philosophy I had early-on learned were a part of the cultural landscape of our democracy, how great words artfully rendered revealed truths and how those words had summoned and focused the humanity of a continent to move for liberation, time and again.

In 2004, when I saw Barack Obama address the Democratic National Convention, it was the first time I had seen any political figure so infused with this deep historic current of poetry, philosophy, and brilliantly humane rhetoric, so exhibiting the hope, faith and fearless devotion to the idea of American democracy, to the aspiration inherent in that idea. It was a moment whose resonance, in combination with a growing grassroots pro-democracy movement, is now deservedly incalculable. With the unflappable poise of humanitarian principle, indignant about the poisoning of our public discourse, and serious about serving, Obama reminded us that in the depths of our humanity, we retain, at all times, the urge to distinguish between right and wrong, and to apply our energies to bettering the general condition of the world.

I was living in Europe, working in the Spanish language, talking to people who had fled repressive political systems in other parts of the world, or who had seen such a system choking Spanish society for decades, and receiving critiques and good wishes from all quarters, from the 10th of February, 2007, when I began asking everyone I knew to spend a little time with Barack Obama's announcement speech, on the steps of the old State House in Springfield. No other document, as far as I was concerned, so ably expressed what I felt was my homeland, the fundamental grace and potential good of a place we feel proud of, but don't flaunt, the nation whose icons are foundational ideas and whose revolutionary spirit still lives in us, latent, waiting to take up the challenges of reform and ingenuity, humanism and public discourse, that come in times of historic upheaval.

I was often told, as I had been so many times before, that I was too idealistic for believing Obama could defeat the Republican machine, or the Democratic machine, for that matter. My well-meaning European friends would tell me, as if advising a lost soul, he's too much the poet, too much an idealist, that America is not evolved enough to elect a visionary. And, he's black. America could not be evolved enough to elect an African American, I was endlessly told. And I would say with confidence, ever more sure, that I know they've seen disappointment, corruption and debasement in their politics, that they feel betrayed on a human level by what our government had been doing, but that I know the heart of my country, and I trust that we are ready to do great things, and it's impossible not to recognize the hunger that is everywhere across our culture, for something smarter, better, more compassionate, more effective, for able leadership that manifests the virtues we like to see in ourselves.

I found that at every level, even in one-on-one conversations on other continents, we Americans, or maybe the people of the world generally, are engaged in a fierce struggle against cynicism. It became clearer to me that mayybe it's not about cynics versus idealists, but that those laboring to infect every corner of our political culture with the logic of force and the desolate attitudes of cynicism, were in fact victims of cynicism, already fallen, and that our struggle was not against "the cynics" but against those unfortunate people who had fallen into the moral bankruptcy of cynicism, embracing its flawed logic and its false promises.

American history is full of grave deviations from our ideals, but is also a story of transcendent progress, in service of which we continually open our society, ever further, in search of a more just, more humane, more philosophically progressive and democratic society. We answer challenges, and thanks to the devotion and poetry of as rare a voice as Barack Obama's, we were awakening to the fact that our most perilous challenge was here at home, at the helm, that we were facing a crisis of self-fashioning, in which we could cripple or empower ourselves and future generations.

I'm not the only person whose eyes welled up in joy and faith on the night of November 4, 2008. My staunch Republican father, for example, a vehement McCain supporter, but a now-and-again critic of his party's leadership, told me he could not help being overcome by the beauty and human accomplishment of the moment, that he was proud of his country and that seeing the Rev. Jesse Jackson reduced to tears, at what must have seemed an almost impossible and amazing overturning of historic injustices, moved him deeply.

For me, Barack Obama's inauguration is both a restoration —to our nation's transcendent character of hope and idealism, of confident ingenuity and capacity for great and human vision— and a surpassing of global resonance. It means that people can again find communion in civics, in civility, in unabashed hopes and in the work of manifesting our ideals, always just a little better than the best of us, but always worth reaching for; it means we can find common cause in those "better angels of our nature".

To me, this inauguration marks the beginning of a time in which we will be consistently driven to realize the best of what we are as a political culture, motivated by the constant reminder of one of our most transformative historic achievements. Back in the United States, having returned in hopes of being able to contribute somehow to making this moment more likely, at work on my own projects of expression and innovation, I feel as if I have really come home for the first time to the country of my origins, to the rich earth of a place where the deepest roots and the furthest extensions of my own true self, find nourishment in the hot interplay of public ideas and the real possibility of working together to find the right approach, and be the solutions our times demand of us.

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