Yesterday was supposed to be a half day in the school district, but it turned into a snow day instead, so the half day was bumped to today. Which meant that at 12:05, I was driving out of the school parking lot to get myself lunch and coffee, and my radio was tuned to NPR. The news was of President Barack Obama's Nobel peace prize acceptance speech, from which one phrase leaped out at me:
"The absence of hope can rot a society from within."
Boy, he hit the nail on the head with that one. In one phrase, he summed up exactly how I've been feeling these past couple of weeks about the future of the society we live in.
First, health care reform so compromised (in the non-touchy-feely sense) that it practically demands scare quotes around the word "reform."
Second, the surge in Afghanistan.
Third, the surge in climate-skeptic rhetoric that threatens to undermine real action in Congress on climate change before it even gets started.
Fourth, the undermining of financial reform by -- who else? -- conservative Democrats.
Not to mention the continuing trend in our economy of trying to achieve growth without jobs, which goes back much further than just the last two weeks, but which after last year's scare seems to be the mind-set in which all our political leaders are operating once again, now that the luxury class is no longer threatened with having to live in mere comfort.
The presidency of George W. Bush was -- no exaggeration -- a real existential crisis for this country, a period of time that demanded close and serious reexamination of what we stand for as a nation, what breaches of our rights we can and cannot tolerate, what face the United States would present to the world, and whether we could even continue as an open, democratic republic or would plunge over the precipice into dictatorship and theocracy. We were forced to wonder how wide the gap between the most and least fortunate would be allowed to grow, whether we'd be roughly awakened from the "American dream," whether it matters if a rising tide lifts all boats when so many Americans are being crammed into steerage or simply pitched overboard.
And then came Barack Obama, who offered us a way out of this crisis by presenting a new and different narrative, one of hope and empowerment, in which the things we hoped and wished and dreamed for could be accomplished. No, scratch that -- Obama's campaign did not take place in the passive voice. His was a narrative in which we could accomplish the things we hoped and wished and dreamed for.
And so we elected him.
And found out just how powerless we still are.
Oh, he did a lot of small things for us right off the bat, things he could do with a stroke of his pen, and the fact that these things were small does not mean that they were in any way unimportant -- just that, with the right person in charge, they were easy. Even so, some of them proved to be less easy than they seemed to be at first glance. Supposedly, President Obama closed the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. That's what they said on the radio today. Yet, somehow, Guantánamo is still open.
Personally, I care about human rights a great deal, and I think it was important to close Guantánamo, but I didn't vote for Obama so that he'd close Guantánamo. I voted for Obama because of three things, three big things, three difficult things: climate change, health care reform and the economy.
What has hope gotten us on these issues? Where have our activism and our determination and our passion and our $5 and $10 and $25 and $50 donations gotten us? Two steps forward and three steps back, that's where.
It forces us to consider certain possibilities.
One is that, even with Barack Obama in the White House, America is not a different country than it was under George W. Bush. That our existential crisis was resolve long ago, and that it was decided that America would no longer be the country we were taught as children to believe in: a land of liberty and justice and equality, a promised land of material betterment, a beacon of democracy and human rights. That we are no longer exceptional in values or vitality or spirit, only in the extent of our power; beyond that, we're no different in essence from Brazil, Qin Dynasty China, Tsarist Russia, France under the Sun King, or any other cake-eating aristocracy in history.
Another is that we can have what we still hope and wish and dream for, only we just haven't done enough. How much more will it take? Is there any limit to what's required of us? Should we be ashamed of how little we've done so far? Do we shoulder the entire burden of failure? Though we be unemployed, underemployed, precariously employed or subject to some other yet-unforeseen change in our employment status, must we double, triple, quadruple our monetary contributions? Spend all our waking hours writing letters and making phone calls? Gather in numbers that tempt the wrath of riot police?
Another is that America is suffering from the terminal, incurable sickness of Empire. Inescapably caught up in transactions of decline -- cannibalizing our productive capacity to feed the machineries of high finance, warfare and welfare -- we no longer have any direction to go but down. Having already succumbed to one of Jared Diamond's five precursors to collapse (rigid ideology) and watching another unfold before our eyes (climate change), are we reduced to waiting impotently for the inevitable third factor to bring us crashing down?
Another is that the Constitution to which we pay reverence and tribute is, however loath we may be to admit it, broken. That its one immutable rule -- thou shalt not change the apportionment of the Senate -- ensures that the upper chamber of Congress shall always be the place where progress goes to die, and thus that document, lauded through the ages for its flexibility and capacity to adapt to changing times, is ironically the mechanism that now thwarts our attempts to adapt to multiple crises. That perhaps we need to look to a different founding document, the Declaration of Independence, for guidance: "Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
I have no answer to these questions, no recommendation, no plan of action. I have no words of hope and inspiration, no reassurances, no new angle of perspective.
I just have $40,000 of student loan debt for a degree in a field I can't find work in, a congressman who doesn't represent me, and a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.