cross-posted from Sum of Change and check out Pam Spaulding's post at PHB for more thoughts and discussion.
Yesterday we sent cameras to Glenn Beck's 828 rally and Al Sharpton's rally and march. We posted a handfull of videos from each. But first, a personal comment, if you don't mind. My parents and grandparents were civil rights activists (not to mention anti-war activists and labor organizers). On the same grass where we stood yesterday, my mother stood 47 years ago to watch Martin Luther King Jr. declare his dream for the world. I highly doubt anyone will remember yesterday the way my mother remembers 47 years ago.
On the eve of President Obama's birth date, thoughts turn to his time in office. As a man, countless admire the person, Barack Obama, and yet, feel that they cannot fully celebrate his performance. Hope has all but disappeared. Audacity appears vanquished. Still, some are sure that there is reason to believe. People ponder potentials not fully realized. Prospects for change loom large. Several may be shared in the sentiments offered on this auspicious occasion.
Dreams have yet to die. The desire to write to the President on the anniversary of his birth or converse with him personally is strong. Most will only be able to meet Mister Obama circuitously. Nonetheless, millions will try to talk to the man in the White House. People, such as esteemed Educator, Doctor Cornel West has addressed the President profoundly though the airwaves. "One of America's most provocative public intellectuals," West speaks of what is needed for a genuine success. The Princeton Professor ponders aloud; if only President Obama advanced classlessness.
A recent change of the guard in the Massachusetts Senate race force the President to reveal he is working. We, the American people, are waiting, just as we have been for months and months. For a full year, countless citizens have felt as though they were patient. Yet, the President did not seem to have their interests at heart. True change has not come. Countless constituents anticipate none is forthcoming. Three hundred and sixty five plus have gone by and the American people are tired of being patient.
Today is "Young and Future Generations Day" here at the International Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen, and I'm here with my wife Wahleah and our two-year-old daughter Tohaana. Along with thousands of other young people, we're doing everything in our power to convince world leaders to commit to a fair, ambitious, and legally binding international agreement based on a target of 350 parts per million (ppm), which is the safe upper limit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Less than 400 miles away in Oslo, Norway, President Obama is accepting the Nobel Peace Prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." If ever there was a time and place to live up to that honor, now, in Copenhagen is it.
Four former Nobel Peace Prize winners have endorsed a target of 350ppm. On December 12th, 2008, at the international climate talks in Poznan, Poland, Al Gore (2007 winner) said to a huge crowd: "Even a goal of 450 parts per million, which seems so difficult today, is inadequate. We need to toughen that goal to 350 parts per million."
It is said, as individuals, we can achieve all we conceive, if only we truly believe. President Barack Obama once knew this. He lived this veracity. Indeed, candidate Obama's audacity and accomplishments gave Americans hope. When Barack Obama reached for the sky he realized what no one thought he could. The electorate was energized. People came to expect the country was in for a change. Now, it seems Mister Obama is bogged down by what Eisenhower understood, concerns of the Military Industrial Complex.
The intricacy of the Armed Forces mission does not confine itself to forceful martial escalation. Nothing escapes the wide reach of combative nation building. Lives are lost. Limbs crushed. With bullets ablaze, brains are battered or blown to smithereens. Hope suffers. Hearts are hurt.
You didn't misread that title - SB400, the bill in the PA State Senate for statewide single payer health care, is getting some hearings because of Republican State Senator Don White. Here in Pennsylvania, single payer isn't a partisan issue. We've got bipartisan bills in the Senate and House with Governor Rendell's pledge to sign them if they pass.
The hearing will take place on December 16, from 9:00-10:30 AM in room 8E-A East Wing, located on the lower level of the Capitol building. Those in support of SB400 will have 45 minutes to present their information and arguments, and those opposed will also have 45 minutes.
This is a vitally important step forward, and one of the only times in history that a state-based single payer bill has been granted a senate committee hearing.
Whether you live in Pennsylvania or not, this is great news for progressives. Follow me below the fold to find out more and see how you can help.
Symbolism is very powerful, and great Presidents use it to set the tone of their Presidency. It is the "Bully Pulpit" because Presidents tell the people "this is the way it is now," then repeat the message and they act in ways that consistently reinforce it, until the message ripples out and people start acting accordingly.
FDR took office and signaled change. What could be more dramatic that his first 100 days? Message: The government will from now on be on the side of the People.
Reagan certainly signaled change. Message: The government will now be on the side of the wealthy. The rest of you are on your own.
Bush II certainly signaled change. People understood that we will be a country ruled by men, not laws. (And he meant men. Wealthy, white men.)
What has Obama signaled? What tone has he set? What actions have backed up his words? What new direction does the country understand we are following?
I don't want to get too gooshy as we go into the Thanksgiving holiday weekend by giving you all the stuff I'm thankful for, but it does seem like an appropriate moment to be a little more reflective than usual. The thing I want to focus on today is the hope for a better world.
It is very easy to be pessimistic and cynical about the chance for things to get better as we fight our issue and political battles. Wealthy powerful special interests are entrenched and seem able to run everything. Too many politicians are incompetent or corrupt. Well-intentioned organizations are sometimes pretty ineffectual. The establishment's conventional wisdom seems set in stone. And I think we have seen so many things in the last few decades that have made us cynical about our government and questioning about our leaders, it is easy to think that nothing will ever change. I know for me, reading the Church committee report about the CIA, The Pentagon Papers, and the Nixon White House tapes transcripts as a young man was enough to make me very skeptical about the nature of our government at the time.
I think a certain level of healthy skepticism about our government and the establishment is a very good thing, and should be cultivated. The problem arises when skepticism turns cynical and pessimistic, and infects how we view every single thing in life and politics. At the heart of progressivism is the hope that it is possible to make a better world, that progress is indeed within our reach. When Barack Obama ran a campaign with a slogan he borrowed from Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers, Yes We Can, and preached his gospel of hope, he was tapping into a long progressive tradition dating back to our very founding as a country. Heading into that terrible winter at Valley Forge, Tom Paine, wrote: "Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it and repulse it." Lincoln at Gettysburg, at that terrible moment honoring those tens of thousands of fallen soldiers at their gravesites, spoke of the hope "that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." Martin Luther King, Jr., in a discouraging moment in his great work, said that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it curves toward justice", and the civil rights movement anthem's chorus sang out "We Shall Overcome".
We progressives should embrace the hope that our movement, the progressive movement, has always carried as its banner. It is conservatives who have always feared change and doused the flames of hope, conservatives who said government could not do anything right or make progress for the American people.
I write this because I see too often the deep cynicism of many friends in the progressive movement, the assumption that virtually every politician is corrupted by being an insider, that every compromise in the legislative process is a sleazy one, that every progressive group is a sell-out. I see it in the responses I sometimes get when I write about my hopes for passing legislation that could be improved on in the future, where people ask why I think any piece of legislation will be improved on given that corporations run America. I see it in articles by progressive thinkers like Jamie Galbraith, who wrote on Monday an entire blog post about how hopeless everything was in terms of making changes in economic policy. I see it in progressive talk show hosts and comedians and media figures: a sense of gloom about any prospects for a better future are everywhere I look.
While righteous anger and cynical humor are an important part of our work, progressivism that is at its core cynical and pessimistic doesn't work over the long run. For one thing, it will burn itself out. When I was a young organizer being trained, I was told that you can't organize people if you are too depressed to be hopeful, that if you were feeling burnt out, you should take a vacation or even get into a different line of work. I still believe that to be true. Righteous anger is a great thing, and can feed you for a while, but if it's not leavened with hope, it won't sustain you over the long good fight. But it also doesn't work because the internal contradiction is too great. Telling people that we can change things for the better while being cynical about any hope for change is a self-defeating philosophy.
Albert Camus wrote in The Plague that "once the faint stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague ended." It is our job as progressives not just to attack the powers that be, not just to fight against the establishment, but to breathe life into those faint stirrings of hope, and to believe in them ourselves. It is easy to be a cynic with all the bad things that happen in the world. It takes more courage to believe that we can, someday soon, overcome. It is our hope and optimism that gives us the strength to keep fighting the odds against us, that keeps us going in the face of the money and power of the entrenched special interests. And history is very clear on this point: those with the faith and hope that they could indeed overcome the odds did quite often prevail. The abolitionists won their 40-year battle, the suffragists prevailed after 90 years of struggle, Jim Crow was finally beaten 90 years after African-American rights were abandoned by the North with the end of reconstruction. Through decades of violence, derision, arrests, intimidation, our progressive ancestors never gave into despair and defeatism. We should take their example to heart, and have hope for the future, hope that we can make progress, hope that we can build a more perfect union. Hope and virtue have survived: now let's make them flourish.
Eight years ago today, two planes flew into the World Trade Center, another crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth landed in a Pennsylvania field. The raw power of that day came to be symbolized by a date composed of three numbers. Three numbers that evoked the shock of being attacked, the horror of the sounds and images on our television sets, and the heroism of so many men and women. Three numbers that framed the events of the last decade and seemed like they would define my generation.
But eight years ago, many in my generation couldn’t vote. We didn’t choose the President, his wars, or his policies. In fact, young Americans have largely rejected the politics of fear and division that dominated those formative years of our political consciousness—voting 2 to 1 in favor of Barack Obama. Today we remember the victims and honor our heroes, but we also have a new President, new crises, and three new numbers: 3-5-0. 350.
I'm a progressive and you're a progressive, but I'm starting to find reason to hope as you're coming off a giant sugar high and plunging into the deep despair of one betrayed and scorned. What gives?
1. I don't expect much of elections, whereas you imagine each time, contrary to all preceding evidence, that they create transformative change. If you expect elections alone to do much, then you're guaranteed to be very excited and then very disappointed, repeatedly, and almost frequently enough for people to catch on.
I'm on a Midwest swing of my book tour and unlike my other trips so far, I am running into some Republicans at my book events (as well as spending some time with relatives who are Republicans). Part of that, of course, is that I am close to home, and in places like Lincoln, NE, people come out to see the hometown boy who has gone to the big city, even if they are of a different political persuasion. And part of it is simply location: there are simply a lot more Republicans per capita in Nebraska than there are in most of the cities I've been to on the book tour (SF, NYC, Boston, etc.).
It has led to some interesting questions and conversations which I love. There are few things I like better than a fun debate.
I have a nephew who is a very conservative Republican, and is also a strong debater. He has read The Progressive Revolution, which must have been tough for him to take, and is planning on writing me a long response, which I look forward to getting. But in the meantime, he pushed me very hard on the whole hope vs. fear theme of my book, said it was a cheap shot, that progressives have been using fear in their arguments as much as conservatives.
It's a worthy argument. More in the extended entry.
Earlier this year, I visited my father, who lives in the Bay Area. As we drove from the Oakland airport, the conversation quickly turned to the Obama presidency. Born in 1923, my dad survived the Great Depression, fought in World War II, endured vicious Jim Crow segregation and violence, participated in the Civil Rights Movement, and, this year, witnessed the inauguration of an African-American president of the United States.
On our drive, he reminisced about how, at age 8, he had gone with his 2nd grade class to see the cavalcade of then-president Herbert Hoover as it drove through downtown Detroit. A year later, the country would throw Hoover out of office for his gross mishandling of the economy, choosing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his message of change. Before my dad's teen years were through, he would join the Marines and defend a segregated nation from within a segregated military. Traveling to and from southern military bases, he would experience racial humiliation, threats, and violence from white fellow Americans, often while wearing his Marine uniform.
As we marveled at the progress we've made as a country, we drove by block after block of boarded up houses in some of Oakland's African-American neighborhoods, many with foreclosure signs visible. Many homes in the same neighborhoods still sported lawn signs reading "Change" and "Hope."
As the Obama presidency sinks in, many are interpreting it in absolute terms: arguing either that it shows that racial bias and discrimination are no longer factors in American life, or that the election means little for race relations, reflecting merely a unique confluence of events-a historically unpopular incumbent, a historically bad economy, a gifted politician raised by white folks who ran a flawless 21st century campaign against a pair of tone-deaf 20th century opponents. News media coverage mostly echoed that polarized, simplistic discourse, with an emphasis on the "post-racial America" narrative.
In the course of my life I have learned to be very careful when I'm drawn to use that terminology---after all, I have lived through the fall of the Soviet Union, and even the election of Reagan himself, among other remarkable and shocking developments.
However, I can't escape the conclusion that we currently face the most severe and numerous set of crises ever. There is a real chance the human race, as we know it, won't survive until 2100. Is that a probability, maybe, most likely, but certainly, a real possibility.
We, the United States, the most powerful nation on earth, started the first eight years of this deciding century, with an unbelievable dumb ass as our leader. Who would have predicted that he'd be as ineffective and harmful as he was? Very few. But, we've just about run out of room for surprises----our chances for survival increase substantially with predictability.
Thus, in an effort to both predict and control the future let me offer the following: if Obama (liberalism) should fail in this country then there will probably be a return to power of the hard-core conservatives. And we have no time at all for 4 or 8 more years of garbage.
I am fully aware that earnest political differences are as old as the ages but, just when we can't tolerate it, and can't afford it, we are faced with what I will call the "absurdists". I won't dwell on it here, but what exactly is Sarah Palin? I follow current events and political developments quite closely and the truth is that I didn't see a scintilla of evidence that she knows anything. And yet she is being hailed by many as the future of the Republican Party. She is popular. Other possible "leaders" of the right include Huckebee of Arkansas (certainly a potential member of the American Taliban, if we had one, or maybe we do), Romney (who will clearly say anything at anytime and comb his hair, to try to get elected), and Jindal (somone who would rather watch his fellow Louisiana citizens suffer with no income than to risk his own personal political outlook): a real "leader" at a time that the situation mandates just that. Can you imagine if McCain had won? What would that old, stupid man be doing now? Continuing the exercise of fairy tales over science? Or is Limbaugh their "leader", a rascist, opiate-addicted, fat and filthy, blowhard? I won't even mention Guiliani and Fred Thompson. Better to leave it unsaid.
They have no real leader, and yet we must be led. I never would have imagined that we'd yearn for the days of the Rockefellars or their ilk, the so-called Liberal Republican who, although they were clearly wrong and misquided, at least appeared to be sincerely intellectual in their approach.
Yes, a relapse to the control of today's "conservative" is to rejoin a doctrine of sheer stupidity, of fable over science, of bigotry over real equality, of greed over generosity, and, yes, of pure hard-core capitalism over shared, spread the risk and reward, socialism. We can't afford to go there, to go back, to choose ignorance over intelligence. If we do, we will lose and be destroyed for sure.
So, out of necessity, Obama must be made to succeed. He's there now, he is president, and he must succeed. There is no choice if we are to survive as a species. And the more that one hears talk of the "stimulus" as not being large enough, and of the banks really "owning" Obama, etc., the more unlikely it appears that he is on target on his own to succeed.
Therefore, logic dictates only one possible solution: activism, with a real sense of urgency, rarely achieved before in America. Yes, this is life and death. It's up to the people. The time is now!!
A bell rings. The sound reverberates. A sentiment shared aloud resonates within the heart, mind, body, and soul of persons who heard the message. No matter the actions taken afterward, sullen statements are not easily erased from memory.
Days before Congress was asked to pass the stimulus package, the President uttered the now famous phrase; "I won," Republicans, as could have been expected, expressed resentment. Immediately, subsequent to President Obama's statement Democrats were said to have followed the Chief Executive's lead. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was asked if he thought Republicans might block the initiative. Empathically, he replied; "No." Today we know differently. In the House, the measure received no support from the Grand Old Party.
As we await approval from the Senate we may wish to consider, the past. Words that evoke division have a lasting effect.
Please peruse a missive penned shortly after President Obama reacted to pressure from the "Right."
I teach English to Japanese people of all ages who live in my city. Tonight I taught one of my kids, a 4th grader named Kyoka. Kyoka and her family have lived in the US for a little over seven months. She's gone from barely saying two words to me in an hour-long lesson, to having excited conversations where she expresses herself fully, even with the limited English she knows.
Today I came to my lesson wearing a new Obama shirt that I bought last night at his rally in Cincinnati. I taught Kyoka's mother first, and when election day came up in our discussion, I showed her my shirt. Later she pointed it out to her daughter when they were trading places at the desk next to me.
I thought Kyoka would like to tell me about her first ever Halloween celebration in the US, but after a few minutes of talking candy and costumes, she abruptly changed the subject.
"Katie is..." she said, pointing at my shirt, "...Obama?"
"Yes," I told her. "I love Obama. I want him to win tomorrow."
Kyoka nodded. She leaned back in her chair resolutely. "I am same," she said.
I tried not to melt, but I pretty much failed on that account.
Obama can resonate even with a little girl who's alien to the language and culture he speaks through. That (and the fact that she calls McCain "other I don't know name man") is what's keeping my heart afloat through this night, and probably through all the panic and jitters of tomorrow.
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