He may not have banged the nail flat smack on the head, but Barack Obama, in his recent speech on race, did manage to courageously pound some light into some very dark and fear-filled corners.
He did this even though he knows how little “play” is available in the black and white American psyche. He took the high road nonetheless. He knows that 20 years of conservative flag-waving and mindless media chatter have left the political left mistrustful and exhausted and the political right reactionary and intolerant, but he chose to speak neither to the right or to the left, but rather to the heart of both.
A few more rounds of that kind of heartfelt truth-telling and Senator Obama may find himself addressing a new audience – an audience composed of those countless folks who have, in the numbing passage of the last eight years, given up altogether on political discourse. As I see it, it is truth-telling and truth-telling alone that might one day serve to awaken the sleeping giant that is the generous spirit at the heart of American democracy.
The moral high ground is there for Obama to take, if he can somehow manage to do the impossible, and keep his head above the rising cesspool of corruption and that so easily sucks the soul out of ambitious politicians.
That said, I was genuinely heartened by his recent speech, in that he sounded significantly less like a politician and noticeably more like a human being – a suffering human being, trying as each of us must, to make some sense of a complex and painful world.
Here’s a quote from the great Cornel West that I believe speaks to the larger dilemma. “The categories of optimism and pessimism don’t exist for me. I’m a blues man. A blues man is a prisoner of hope, and hope is a qualitatively different category than optimism. Optimism is a secular construct, a calculation of probability. Black folk in America have never been optimistic about the future – what have we had to be optimistic about? But we are people of hope. Hope wrestles with despair, but it doesn’t generate optimism. It just generates this energy to be courageous, to bear witness, to see what the end is going to be. No guarantee, unfinished, open-ended. I’m a prisoner of hope. I’m going to die full of hope…”
It’s too soon to tell whether or not the response to his recent speech will begin to part the waters and so help push Obama far enough ahead of Hillary that the agonizing infighting might cease. More and more I feel it is time for her to give up the field – if only for the sake of the deeper sense of hope that the junior senator offers those most in need of it.
I read today that in September of 2006, Hillary voted against an amendment to ban the U.S. military’s use of cluster bombs – a brutal weapon that reserves its greatest damage on women and children. Obama voted for the ban. Is there any conscionable way to regard Hillary’s decision on this and many other war-related issues as anything other than expedient politics? I have great admiration for the woman as a courageous and indefatigable fighter, but I fear she has been speaking the language of politics so long, and is so conversant with its shady intricacies, that she will never be able to speak as Obama does, to the soul of the country or to ever truly help our nation put an end to what Dr. West has called this chilling “ice age” of power and greed. This is the change that we all most need to support.
Postscript: A little more truth-telling. I just came across this from Obama, when asked if he used marijuana… “I inhaled frequently” “That was the point.”
