Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Epilogue)
I thought about the voices of all the people I’d met on the campaign trail. ... It wasn’t just the struggles of these men and women that had moved me. Rather, it was their determination, their self-reliance, a relentless optimism in the face of hardship. It brought to mind a phrase that my pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., had once used in a sermon.
The audacity of hope.
That was the best of the American spirit, I thought – having the audacity to believe that despite all evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict; the gall to believe that despite personal setbacks, the loss of a job or an illness in the family or a childhood mired in poverty, we had some control – and therefore responsibility – over our own fate.
It was that audacity, I thought, that joined us as one people. It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family’s story to the larger American story, and my own story to those of the voters I sought to represent.
I initially took on the exercise of reading this book, though perhaps burden is a more appropriate word than exercise, to better know my enemy. It took me a little longer to articulate exactly what my goal was – to understand the man and his beliefs, rather than just assume he is a caricature of the typical progressive. It is easy to demonize one’s opponents without really understanding them – you just stick them in a pre-made box and attack the box. Frequently in that case, one’s attacks come across as cliched and petty-sounding, only marginally suitable for a real thoughtful critique.
I learned something.
I learned that in this case, at least, the caricature isn’t a caricature. It’s real.
With very few exceptions, Obama is the party-line progressive of the last 100 years, repackaged in a youthful, charismatic, minority box, ready for immediate consumption by today’s modern, hip, Democratic voter. There’s rhetoric galore about getting along, about meeting people’s needs, about subsidizing people’s lifestyle choices – all things that are great if you live in San Francisco or Boulder or some politically and culturally homogeneous place where people actually want all of the stuff that he’s selling.
For the rest of us though, it seems that the options presented to us are to get with the program, or get out of the way and hand over our wallets. I don’t want the culture he’s selling, no matter how many times he pretends that it’s a culture of community and fellowship. It’s coerced community and forced fellowship, with his cult of personality and a big fat welfare state as it’s centerpiece.
I don’t want the economy that he’s selling either. He’s very clear that corporations exist to employ people, and their rights in and of themselves are minimal. Bluntly, it seems that there is nothing that cannot be taken away from a corporation, no limit on what the accommodations they can be forced to make. You make too much money? We confiscate it and redistribute that wealth. You have inflexible working hours? We force you to negotiate new working hours with each and every employee (no kidding, reference to this was made in passing in the epilogue.) This is part and parcel of the fixed-pie economy method of thinking – corporations exist to hand out jobs and nothing more. Any second-order effect on the economy, like prices going up in response to mandated inefficiencies, is to be ignored.
At night, the [Lincoln Memorial] is lit but often empty. Standing between marble columns, I read the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. I look out over the Reflecting Pool, imaging the crowd stilled by Dr. King’s mighty cadence, and then beyond that, to the floodlit obelisk and shining Capitol dome.
And in that place, I think about America and those who built it. This nation’s founders, who somehow rose above petty ambitions and narrow calculations to imagine a nation unfurling across a continent. And those like Lincoln and King, who ultimately laid down their lives in the service of perfecting an imperfect union. And all the faceless, nameless men and women, slaves and soldiers and tailors and butchers, constructing lives for themselves and their children and their grandchildren, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, to fill in the landscape of our collective dreams.
It is that process I wish to be a part of.
My heart is filled with love for this country.
What grabs me the most in this whole thing is how Obama can love this country, without understanding it, even a little. Those Founders didn’t just imagine a nation unfurling across a continent, they imagined a stable and free government in which people could govern themselves in self-determination without fear of oppression and interference. All of this, and I mean all of it, seems to have gone right over Obama’s head, in favor of his view that the Founders set up a system by which the working man can bang his fists on the table and demand a larger piece of pie.
That’s not America. And that’s not a vision of America to be proud of. That’s greed, thuggery, and no matter how you dress it up, that’s democracy subverted into bullying. But it seems that as long as you give people a sense of community in their bullying, it suddenly becomes acceptable. Everyone else is doing it, ya know?
I, too, wish for a change in the culture. I want people to work together, to join forces in helping the less fortunate, to push for higher personal and public standards. But I want them to do it voluntarily, to make the choice to live better lives and to demand better from others. One cannot impose community or cooperation from above – that’s effectively fascism.
I think it would be excessive to say that Obama is the worst thing to happen to this country. I don’t think his platform differs all that significantly from any of the last few Democratic presidential nominees. He’s right in the mainstream, as far as Democratic thought is concerned.
But that progressive ideology is something that must be fought tooth and nail every step of the way. Those of us on the right who understand what such things do to our culture, our moral fiber as a people, know that we can’t take much more of what progressivism has already brought us. There are those who would see us be more like Europe… and there are those who understand and appreciate the uniqueness that America is in the world.
It seems that most people who say that there is no difference between the candidates are those who have an unattainable ideal in mind for what this country should be. We aren’t going there, like it or not. What we do have, today, right in front of us, are two candidates – the progressive liberal and the moderate. I can’t say where the moderate will take us, and I’m as skeptical as the rest of you about him.
However, I now know exactly where the liberal wants to take us, and it is to a place of substantially greater taxes, greater control of your children, greater control of your health care choices, greater control of your diet, justices on the highest court of the land that feel no compulsion to respect the rule of law, etc. I, for one, cannot sit idly by and pretend there are no differences between the candidates.
Nothing in this book changed my mind about who I would vote for. But it did cement my reasons for doing so. I love my country too, but unlike Obama, I love it for the freedom and stability that it provides. Not just for the coffers that can be plundered and handed out to loyal voters.
Please vote for McCain in November. The future of our nation depends on each and every one of us doing the right thing on election day, even when it hurts our principles to do so.
Comments
-
I’ve said it before.
We’re on a river, drifting toward a waterfall.
We have one major party candidate who wants us to row toward the waterfall...and the other major party candidate doesn’t respect oars but rather wants us to install a turbine-powered outboard and steer _that_ toward the waterfall.
Never before in my lifetime has the phrase “lesser of two evils” more obviously reflected the choices of the mainstream voter.
But that doesn’t mean I’m confused about which one _is_ the lesser of those two evils. And while I’m normally very much in favor of correcting bad behavior on the part of the good guys by refusing to reward it at the ballot box, an election cycle with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress and only an undependable one-vote majority on the Supreme Court on our side is not the time.
Vote McCain. Then go home and shower for six hours while moaning “unclean, UNCLEAN!!”.
Matt | 7/30/2008 11:55 PM CDT -
I’ll have to mildly disagree with you, on one point. I DO think Obama is the worst thing that can happen to this country.
He’s every bit the socialist/communist that the NUT farmer was, but he’s ALSO a minority.
It’s bad enough that he has all these socialist ideals he wants me to fund ... but that handy little “handicap” of his being a minority means that none of us can question him without the great unwashed masses of takers in this country dismissing us as racists.pete in Midland | 7/31/2008 10:29 AM CDT -
His Inflated-ness’s language carries no meaning. For example, “..fill in the landscape of our collective dreams.” These are movie trailer words. This film “fills in the landscape...” The more obscure and tormented constructions sound like art-talk. “He postulated a clarity to the dimensions of rationality transending the limitations of color...” I’m just making thatup, but so is His Inflated-ness. If I had the skills to do it, I’d change those graphic posters of His Inflated-ness to a Superman comics’ Bizarro World visage.
Broadsword | 8/5/2008 06:52 AM CDT -
I think this article done a great job.What a best way to describe your view. Thanks for sharing with us. Really like your informative article. Hopefully we will get more interesting topic from you in future.
buy isk | 9/12/2008 12:33 AM CDT
