You’re the ones to make most of the change you want, not the incoming president
By Matt Nicodemus, Educator-activist, Taipei, Taiwan
January 20, 2009
I’m going to tell you something that Barack Obama’s been telling you for a long time, but you might not have really heard it when he told you. People listening to Obama, especially ones who’ve backed him strongly, tend not to think so clearly when they see his handsome image and hear his compelling voice.
My mother’s been crazy for Barack Obama for the entire past year. During the primary season, his campaign’s progress – and the faults of his main Democratic Party opponent, "that woman" (Hillary Clinton – in her late 70s, Mom’s got some memory issues), were regular topics in our weekly late-night-dishwashing (on my end) phone calls. And because my father was seriously ill, I visited my parents at their home in Boulder, Colorado several times during 2008 and so could witness first-hand Mom’s Obamamania and experience more immediately how deeply this candidate had touched the hearts and minds of American voters and non-voters alike and inspired so much hope throughout society that even the jaded, cynical mainstream news media seemed unable to avoid gushing over the man, his wife, his children, and the many factors which had made his rocketing political ascension a reality. (my father, a retired newspaper man who’d grown up and done most of his reporting in Obama’s home state of Illinois, was equally passionate about the then-senator’s candidacy but was too weak most of the time to show it)
I arrived home for my last visit on October 30, less than a week before Election Day, and was instantly and then continuously bombarded by a blizzard of campaign coverage (during which time it again became crystal clear just what priority CNN really gives to making sure Americans are informed and up to date about the rest of the world) and observed, in famously progressive Boulder, an overwhelming outpouring of support for the Obama-Biden ticket. It seemed that every third yard or front window had a big Obama sign, and I’m sure the number of such advertisements would have been much greater if not for the resource-conserving eco-orientation of so many residents. I’m also sure that many of those not posting signs or stickers had taken on other assignments in Obama’s massive non-violent army for Change, contributing money, canvassing neighborhoods on foot and phone, spreading the word through their personal networks, and/or volunteering for election day get-out-the-vote efforts. My parents had sent in their check to the local Democratic Party, and Mom had just had one of the thrills of her life when my brother Andrew and his girlfriend took her to be part of the biggest Obama campaign rally of the year at the state house in Denver.
Then came November 4, truly a momentous day in U.S. history. Even though the result of the election was by then pretty much a foregone conclusion, the excitement and passion across the political spectrum at the end of an toughly fought campaign battle, combined with the enormous extra energy felt by Obama supporters who knew that the long-struggled-for promised land of victory, of finally turning things around and bringing the nation out of its 8-year nightmare darkness under the Bush regime, was being steadily, irrevocably entered with every vote, every tally, and every reported result, made for 24 hours that will never be forgotten by hundreds of millions of American citizens, and billions more people around the world. News coverage intensified and amplified the social-psychological effects of the occasion by bringing us not just a stream but a constant, fast-flowing all-channels-and-stations river of ideas and images, from the massive-scale video shots of rallies, bustling campaign offices, long lines of people waiting to cast ballots, and the soon-to-be iconic celebration gathering of humanity in Chicago’s Grant Park to the thousands of interviews of individuals, so many of whom had joined in the movement to elect Obama – and it was a genuine movement, unlike most presidential drives – and more than a few of whom had taken part in the civil rights struggles of the preceding 50+ years which had sacrificed so much and fought so determinedly for the kinds of opportunities for people of color that were being so fully realized by Obama’s triumph. As someone who grew up in a racially integrated, forward-thinking Chicago suburb, who learned about the 60s and 70s movements against war and for civil rights and environmental protection as they were unfolding and who later became a deeply committed activist for peace, human rights, and the well-being of all Earth, I couldn’t help but be touched to the core to watch this democratic process so clearly turn the page to a new chapter of the United States that was fervently desired by such a sizable majority of its stakeholders.
However, the magic of the moment extended far beyond lines of political distinction. Even myriad Republicans, while sad over John McCain’s loss, felt the sense of wonder and satisfaction that a man named Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, could rise from very modest, middle-class roots to attain the highest governmental position in the most powerful country of all time. And Americans’ super-positive, unifying sentiments were shared by people everywhere, whose outpourings of joy were unprecedented, and showed just how important America’s continuing process of "perfection", as the president-elect calls it, is to humanity.
Back in Boulder, we got a big dose of the post-election spike in mutual affection that shot through society. One of my parents’ caregivers reported walking down streets full of people smiling broadly and easily at one another, while another told of being given a free cup of coffee by a happy café owner when he found himself short of money. My mom began uttering, whenever she’d see Obama on TV, a phrase that became a mantra over the following weeks: "I’m so proud. I’m so proud of what we’ve done."
But what has been done, actually? This question occupied my thoughts, in future-perfect form, long before the polling places opened, as I looked forward to Obama’s likely victory, and in the buildup to Inauguration Day, I’ve been hoping sincerely that my fellow Americans, particularly those who share with Obama his vision and proposals for national advancement, have been considering both the question and the answers to it which the president-elect began giving from the day he first announced his run for office in February 2007.
Simply put, what was mainly accomplished, through the primaries and final election on November 4 was the choosing by a large margin of America’s first president of color. That was Change #1. Not that that change was small; it was gigantic, in both symbolic and practical terms. Thousands of articles have described in intimate and, to my political-professional view, exciting detail, this massive, super-organized, super-committed, average Joe- and Josephine-funded, will.i.am-soundtracked and ultimately successful campaign which has, in the words of one friend of mine, "given a new meaning to the word ‘grassroots’." That collective endeavor managed, against many if not all odds, to mobilize 69,456,897 registered adult voters to pull the lever, punch the card or otherwise mark their ballots for Barack Obama, enough voters so that the senator from Illinois was able to beat his fellow senator from Arizona by a margin of nearly 10 million votes.
Of course, Obama & co. had a lot of crucial help beyond the Barack-and-roll volunteers and donors. They had George W. Bush and his raft of disastrously failed policies, they had McCain not being able to distance himself far enough from the sorry legacy of the man whom he hoped to replace and selecting a clearly unqualified vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, they had a highly unpopular war going on, producing fresh U.S. casualties on an almost daily basis, and they had a seasoned Democratic Party machine to add the muscle, experience, wisdom, and connections that are needed to win any major political race. And then they had the deal-sealing first major explosions of the global financial meltdown. From then on, they just needed to stay sharp and disciplined and manage things so no major mistakes would be made on the way to the White House, and that they did.
So why, with the election a completed fact and the new administration set to get right down to serious business, are so, so many people so, so wild about January 20? Why is Washington D.C. projecting that it will have more than one million guests today? Could it possibly be only that all those citizens and tourists want to share in the historic mass acknowledgement of a sea change in race relations in America? No, certainly not, though most people attending or otherwise viewing Obama and Biden take their oaths of office will have that acknowledgement in mind. No, what I think makes this occasion so special, so unique in our American story, is the same thing that distinguished the election that brought it about from all previous others, and that is Change #2, the other most-used word in the Obama camp: Hope. This was the candidate of "Yes, we can." This is the man who swore allegiance to healing a fractured society, to bringing all Americans together, from all segments and sectors, to address and solve the problems which have dragged us and much of the rest of the world down into suffering, bitter anger, contention, and despair, and who has stayed tenaciously on that message from start to present. This is the first president who, for any period of his life before taking office, ever identified himself primarily as a community organizer working to help the poor and disenfranchised gain a sense of their own worth and power. This is the man, and the movement, that showed once again and in such stark, beautiful relief how the common people, cooperating for a vision of better neighborhoods, better communities, a better country, and better relationships with other countries and the Earth they’re all occupying, can transcend even the greatest barriers to progress and accomplish seemingly impossible tasks. This is the elected president, and all he represents, whom countless multitudes are so eager to see take the inaugural oath to formally assume leadership of the nation and, in a real sense, the world. This is the man who at this moment most publicly embraces and embodies our hopes and dreams.
But this is not the leader who is going to tackle most of our problems, bring most of the needed relief, and do most of the moving the U.S. forward and upward. This is not the savior so many of us have been seeking so desperately. That leader – those leaders, those saviors – would be the rest of "we", the we who can, which is to say, as Barack Obama has so frequently, the rest of us Americans. During the campaign, he urged us to look around and look within, and then decide how we personally would make a difference for the better. From the stage at Grant Park, he reminded us that any valid, lasting solutions to the enormous challenges we face could only come through our common strivings for common goals. And late last week, in Joseph Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, on a train following the historic route taken by the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, to a similar ceremony 148 years ago, Obama promised again that, once in office, he and his vice-president would "fight for you every day" and "work hard with you every day." Again, the world’s most famous living community organizer was clear and consistent in his sober yet inspiring entreaty to all of his fellow Americans: "Now it falls to us."
But I fear those Americans, including lots of Obama’s biggest fans, still have not adequately grasped the meanings of his words and the necessities they call for. So many of them love the warm, wonderful feelings they have when they imagine President Obama, his extremely competent, experienced staff and appointees, and a cooperative, collaborating Democratic-controlled Congress taking up the people’s causes, actually representing us, and taking the U.S. in long, glorious strides forward. But what I think Obama has been trying so hard to convey, with his speeches, with the new ways he went about winning the election, and with his attempts to establish a more user-friendly, highly participatory, and self-aware structure of relationship between government and the governed, is something that he would not, as a mainstream politician, be able to admit openly at this point. I think Obama and his team, his closest partners and allies, want us to understand that representative democracy as it has been practiced to date is fundamentally flawed and insufficient to produce the "more perfect" democracy which they believe is now not only achievable but essential. It simply doesn’t work to vote people into office and hope that they’ll stand for you just because they get your letters, e-mails, and phone calls, see your occasional public demonstrations, and worry that you might not vote for them the next time around. In our two-party, winners-take-all system where public fear and private power play such dominant yet accepted roles, there’s no way that we can primarily rely on those we elect to make the right decisions and effectively implement them for the good of the entire country and the wider global family.
At the dawn of what could be a new, substantially different, and vastly better period of American history, I will coin a term to describe what I believe is Barack Obama’s hope and dream, and what is definitely mine: presentative democracy. We the people, we ourselves, must arrange our situations, must make our life choices, so that we are as fully as possible present to manage our collective affairs, to investigate our world directly, and to be present as vital parts of the treatments for its ailments. If we want justice, we must present ourselves to make and defend justice. If we want peace, we must present ourselves as devoted peacemakers. If we want health and happiness in a clean, safe environment, we must be present to co-create that state of affairs. We do not merely express our opinions to politicians and hope that they might re-present those views when decisions about our future are made; we do all we can to present those opinions ourselves, and to vigorously, insistently present ourselves for meaningful inclusion in all the processes of public intercourse. In presentative democracy, though there is still government, it is government which operates completely in the context of a broad, rich fabric of life-affirming community activity, which reflects and enhances the high aspirations and solid commitments to a vibrant, powerfully caring society of human beings who want to give as much to each other as they receive, who confidently state that when it comes to leading for change, "Yes, we have. Yes, we are. Yes, we will." It is the deep, enduring democracy foreseen by another president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his oft-quoted declaration that "When the people lead, the leaders will follow."
Today, as you watch or listen to Barack Hussein Obama swear to serve his country to the best of his ability, please recognize that this can also and just as importantly be the day of your inauguration, as citizens who labor daily to be more aware, more concerned and compassionate, more careful, more courageous, more community-minded and self-sacrificing, and more involved in the grand project of evolving our society in ways that will bring forth from each of us the words of my mother: "I’m so proud. I’m so proud of what we’ve done."