This is an essay I wrote upon returning from Tanzania and the impact the election of Obama already has.
Why Obama Matters
For a long time I tried to grasp what the election of Barack Obama truly meant. As a 33-year-old white male from the suburbs, the significance of the first non-white male in the White House was best left to others. I did not witness or experience our sometimes shameful past that made an election of a black man so historical.
My view was mostly political, noting that Obama’s Electoral College thumping of the Republican John McCain symbolized the rejection of eight horribly managed years in American history. The much touted MBA-presidency of a "Compassionate Conservative" amounted to a toxic spill of a train wreck that started with the Patriot Act, bled too much in Iraq, drowned in the wake of Katrina and ended with an economic collapse. America has said enough of George W. Bush, his cronies, his war, his incompetence, his disrespect for law and man, his friends’ pilfering of the coffers. McCain was standing on the tracks, and nothing could stop change from coming.
Historians will rightly say that Obama ran a nearly perfect campaign. He mastered the use of new technology, outwitted the Clintons at almost every turn, and he brilliantly maneuvered around the Reverend Wright scandal with a speech that may have won the Presidency from the steps of Philadelphia’s Freedom Hall. The momentary sugar high of Sarah Palin could not contain Obama’s money-raising and mobilization efforts as his rhetoric kept the volunteers and checks coming. Historians will also point out that something about Obama drove masses of young people, new voters and minorities into his camp turning multiple states from red to blue, succeeding where Gore and Kerry had failed. In the end, this was a bloodless revolution; from fear to hope, white to black, the past to the future.
On election night I was in a packed union hall. Screams of relief, tears of joy and smiles abounded when shortly after 8 p.m. they announced Obama had won. The hall fell silent to listen to his remarks in Chicago. The world felt anew. Peace and prosperity was possible again. We hugged, many cried, drinks flowed. Obama’s election, then and there, was like a gasp of air for a nation being waterboarded. With Obama at the helm maybe we could talk about national health care, a quick exit out of Iraq, rebuilding America and restoring the middle class—the issues I cared about, issues, merely issues.
Four weeks after the election I was in Tanzania, nearly as far from my suburb as one can be on the planet. Like most of the Third World, Tanzania is a very small blip on the American radar. Poverty and malaria runs rampant, AIDS is taking its toll and the slumping world economy is hurting its tourist industry, which accounts for nearly 20% of its GDP. But there is no oil there, or war, thank God. The horrors in the Sudan and Congo, the piracy in Somalia are absent here. Tanzania is probably a very sanitized version of Africa, but the poverty is there, the orphanages, the blatant corruption. The reasons why I preferred Obama over McCain are not important here. But within days, even hours, it became obvious how important the election of Barack Obama was.
Like most people on our planet, Obama is not white. This is obvious, but the significance is not.
Over a billion people on this planet are of African heritage. For most, from the countless villages of Africa, the offspring of escaped slaves in South America or the emancipated in North America to the immigrants in Europe, poverty is the norm. Opportunity is rare, hope a commodity not often traded. Being black, being African means something else than what it means to be a middle-class, educated white male from the American suburbs. Pundits behind a desk can point out this out. This is not a revelation. Common sense and a slightly open mind, can tell one that the reality of pulling one up by one’s bootstraps is impossible when so many are barefoot.
In America, all the grays that we indulge ourselves in—taxes, traffic congestion, which books are in our school libraries—don’t mean a damn. Hope and opportunity are fucking campaign slogans here, nothing here is truly black and white and had McCain beaten Obama, America could very well go on just the same. But in Africa, there is a stark naked reality about life, about hope, about opportunity. Opportunity in Africa is that you are not staring down the barrel of a gun held by a 14-year-old recruited into a civil war. Hope is that you do not starve, do not catch cholera and your children are not sold into slavery.
Almost too often, as I spent my two weeks in Tanzania, people would, upon finding out I was from America, say "Obama." It wasn’t merely a noun, or an exclamation, but a statement. Children would cross the street, the oldest would ask if I was from America, then the whole group would shout "Obama!" An older man, would ask the same, calmly state "Obama" and nod. Obama. Obama! OBAMA!!! I felt like the coolest kid in school, that all those years of being an unnoticed nobody at Kopachuck Middle School were all reversed. All because I came from America, the place where Obama was from. One of John McCain’s many campaign boo-boos was the ad mocking Obama for being the biggest celebrity in the world. Now, Obama is.
A hundred miles from the nearest electrical outlet, even further from the nearest high-speed internet line, a camp attendant in the middle of the Serengeti wanted to talk with me about Obama. I often asked, what does Obama mean to you, a few would try to give sophisticated answers, but it was that he was African. He looked more like him than I. The most powerful man in the world is not white, his relatives live in a village that hugs the equator, his name isn’t Christian.
I don’t know if the pride that so many Tanzanians feel about Obama is because he is a role model, or for the first time in the modern age, the most powerful person in the world, was not white. And I don’t know if this gives so many of them hope, if not the courage to tackle the incessant problems that ill much of Africa. Or if it will even change a damn thing.
Tomorrow, hundreds of rapes and murders will occur across the African continent, the civil wars will still fester, the land stripped of its valuables by Western-based corporations made possible by cushy deals with corrupt dictators. America and its corporations, tourists, culture, government and military will still influence Africa when it’s profitable or photo-shoot ready or a trendy cause celebre. Absolute poverty will still reign, followed by disease, and the parts lacking oil, diamonds, terrorists and game reserves will just be ignored. But, for Africa’s children, there and elsewhere, something says that this year may be better than the last.
America’s prestige may have slipped in the past decade, but we are still the beacon for the rest of the world. America bastardizes everything—culture, politics, economics. Even hope and change. Washington, New York and Hollywood may be nearly 10,000 miles away, but technology, ideas and commerce move so quickly nowadays. Yet, as I quickly left the industry, cities and cell phone towers toward the Serengeti, the radically different nature of everything washes away the comfort of familiarity, just as the world in 2009 might be better than in 2008.
A year from now Obama will lose favor with many of us who cheered his victory in November. He won’t do enough to change the course of America’s growing health care crisis. The economy could still be suffering and unemployment could be higher, or he will not have restored the civil liberties that his predecessor stripped away. There will be a long list of what he hasn’t done for those on the left side of the aisle, and likely longer list for those on the right about what he has done. When you inherit a mess, it takes a while to clean up. Change is not always popular.
Whatever Obama accomplishes after January 20th will be an afterthought for most of the world. Most of the world lives in poverty, lives in a village without running water or electricity. Most of the world cannot read past a fifth grade level. Most of the world still lives within a few degrees of the equator where malaria and AIDS, if not violence, keep life painfully short. Most of the world does not look in the mirror and see a white face capable of fulfilling his or her own dreams because opportunity abounds. Most of this world is not white, and certainly not rich, or even capable of ascending out of the socio-economic conditions into which they were born.
Obama changes everything. What I do grasp now, as all those faces lit up in smiles as they spoke, proclaimed and shouted "Obama" is there is nothing wrong with the audacity of hope.