Two odd, unrelated things coincided in my UK hotel room tonight. Two things that have me thinking about what politics means, at the core, where political economy meets philosophy, where looking back meets looking forward, where red meets blue, war meets achievement, and choral singing meets particle physics. More below the fold...
I have been living and working in the United Kingdom for the last eight weeks. Apart from a few months in France when I was in school (and learning the language), this has been my version of world travel. Like many Americans, I hardly ever leave the country. And yet, although England is remarkably close to home in culture, there have been many surprises and many subtle differences. Differences that make me look at my home with different eyes. It has made me see home in some ways better and in some ways worse than when I left.
But that isn't what triggered the writing of my first diary in quite a while. No, instead it was something any long term traveler can relate to. Hotel room boredom.
Anyone who has spent a long time living in a hotel knows what happens when you've seen every movie in town, eaten in every restaurant you can stomach, and all the shops are closed. You start watching TV. You start surfing the web. And it was an amazing (and stupid) juxtaposition that prompted me to write.
I read a Slashdot article that linked to awesome photographs of the Large Hadron Collider at boston.com. As I looked at these incredible images, a stupid reality TV show came on BBC1 called "Last Choir Standing" came on. I listened to a large group of people sing "A Little Help from my Friends" as I saw images of one of the largest, most expensive, and most incredible works of human engineering on my laptop screen.
And I was moved.
I was moved because I found myself moved by beauty of people working together to make something. It didn't matter if it was simply music or if it was an instrument to discover the most fundamental properties of matter and energy (and this most technical of scientific instruments turns out, in a strange way, also to be a work of beauty). What moved me was the idea that intent determined the outcome.
I couldn't help thinking on these acts of discovery and creation and comparing them to acts of violence and destruction. I know it seems freakishly flower-powery of me, but what if our response to the destructive and violent crimes of 9/11 had been singing and building? If we had showed the world what we can create? Certainly a huge human effort went into Iraq, but to what end? What if the power we had went into construction from the beginning? What if, instead of an invasion of a country that had done nothing to us, we had built in Afghanistan a perfect home for the children of Islam? A place of peace and learning?
But I don't even mean to dwell on the mundanity of war versus peace. What meant the most to me was that when people come together with the intent to create, to learn, to discover, then beauty, knowledge, and joy are the results. When power, vengeance, and hatred are the intent, the outcome is terrible.
And, much as it pains me, this is the stark choice in this political season. The parties differ in intent and the outcome of their governance has and will reflect this. Politics isn't the province simply of wonks and pollsters. At issue are fundamental questions of what our intention is when we come together as neighborhoods, communities, cities, states, nations, and peoples. And our intentions create the world we live in.
And the state of the world today is such that no intention is itself an intention. Look at world and decide how you would like it to be. And then go out into the world and put that intention into it.
The great lie is that we cannot change the world. Oh, by God, we can. And we've been the sleepwalking artists and engineers. We've left the world to the thugs and the petty, greedy power seekers. I'd like to see musicians and scientists have a go.
If there is a trap I'm tempted to fall into, it is simple despair. Between global warming and peak oil I tend to see disaster as inevitable and the human race as a problem in itself. But then I contemplate what we have made. What we have built. What we have learned and I realize that our potential is quite beyond comprehension. I am a Democrat. Because the Democrats are about the new, they are about the future, they live in hope and not in the dream of selfish gain and an unreal idyll of the past.