We Want Change... But From What?

It is amazingly simple to characterize the change yearned for by millions in America, the change anticipated by billions across the world, the change embodied by Barack Obama, as a repudiation of George W. Bush and the last eight years of fumbling futility. Amazingly simple, and amazingly simplistic.

Yes, Bush's legacy is a litany of lies, a cavalcade of sins of omission and commission, that overlap and intertwine. The scandals and crimes form a tsunami of noise, inrushing upon a benumbed ear, until all that can be perceived is a background static of wrongness, like the vestigial radiation of the Big Bang that permeates the universe. Bush has pegged his own self-esteem to the deafness of future historians to mishear this static as something generated by "the media" and "the Left." But historians will tune in better than his faint hopes allow, and they will characterize the Bush years as the Big Thud.

And yet, if the Big Thud were all that we were weary of, would the celebrations on the National Mall, and across America, and around the world, be quite so joyous, quite so relieved, quite so frenetic?

No, this is a final repudiation of something that has been growing and festering in America since the halcyon Happy Days of the 1950s, when the Beat Generation rose up along with McCarthyism, when the elan-laden counter culture challenged the dour traditionalists, and when Americans first began to ask themselves "is that all there is?" Materialism, licentiousness, Puritanism, the drug culture, censorship, privacy, civil liberties and civil rights, laissez-faire and Big Government tugged 360 degrees at the edges of the fabric of society. Each point of view had its proponents, the various antagonists forming and reforming political alliances, until the factions and parties in America didn't recognize each other, or themselves, anymore.

The political maelstrom of the 1960s polarized the factions, and Americans lost sight of who we were, what we actually stood for as Americans, because even though it lies at the heart of our founding as a nation, we've never actually been that comfortable with pluralism. It is easier to hate than to embrace the "other."

And after the tragedy of Vietnam ended with a whimper, and Nixon imploded his imperial presidency with a bang, Jimmy Carter slipped into the White House by the side door and was almost as quickly hustled out the back, because Ronald Reagan offered a certitude that Americans flocked to. (As did, in his time, George W. Bush.) The fear of pluralism coupled with the reassuring nostalgia of the 1950s host of General Electric Theater led voters to reject Carter who, on July 15, 1979, had had the wisdom and temerity to actually point out to America exactly what was wrong. Although he never used the word, it became known as Carter's "malaise" speech.

It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation...

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.

Sound familiar? Thirty years later, these words ring truer still, but it took 30 years for the cold comfort of certitude, bought by hewing to an idiotic idiopathic ideology, to be shown for the humbug it is. It took 30 years for Americans to be ready to listen, ready to change.

And it took a remarkable man, the spiritual, intellectual and even genetic product of American pluralism at its best, to ready Americans for this change. Besides being the physical embodiment of pluralism, Barack Obama also enjoys an advantage that Carter did not. He was elected at the nadir to lead America up, whereas Carter was already President when the downward slide was in progress but not fully apparent. Reagan's fallacious "morning in America" cast Carter as a Cassandra, a prophet of doom without honor in his time.

George W. Bush, the Unartful Dodger to Cheney's neo-conservative Fagin, finally exposed anti-pluralism for the hollow monomania it is, and the last eight years of often-in-error, never-in-doubt governance serve as a clarion wake-up call for a world- and war-weary nation.

In calling us back to our national heritage of pluralism, the change Barack Obama urges has been a long time coming, a long time overdue. He calls not for a change in America, but in Americans themselves. And for the first time in several generations, we recognize not only that yes, we must, but that yes, we can.

Comments

[lisa12345]

Great writing!

[Treebranch]

Congratulations on what I think is your best article to date!
Keep writing!