What Our Country Desperately Needs is a Leader Who Loves Us
I remember seeing a picture of Fidel Castro in a parade with lots of
other Cubans. It was during the emergency years, the "special period"
when Cuba's relationship with the Soviet Union had collapsed and there
was little gas or oil or fertiliser; people were struggling to find
enough to eat. It was perhaps Cuba's nadir, as a small Caribbean island
nation considered a dangerous threat by its nearest neighbour, the
United States - which, during this period, tightened its embargo.
Fidel, tall, haggard, his clothes hanging more loosely than usual from
his gaunt frame, walked soberly along, surrounded by thousands of
likewise downhearted, fearful people: he, like them, waving a tiny red,
white and blue Cuban flag. This photograph made me weep; not only
because I love Fidel and the Cuban people, but also because I was
envious.
However poor the Cubans might be, I realised, they cared
about each other and they had a leader who loved them. A leader who
loved them. Imagine. A leader not afraid to be out in the streets with
them, a leader not ashamed to show himself as troubled and humbled as
they were. A leader who would not leave them to wonder and worry alone,
but would stand with them, walk with them, celebrate with them -
whatever the parade might be.
This is what I want for our country, more than anything. I want a leader who can love us. This is
not what we usually say, or think of, when we are trying to choose a
leader. People like to talk about "experience" and war and the economy,
and making Americans look good again. I care about all these things.
But when the lights are out and I'm left with just the stars in a
super-dark sky, and I feel the new intense chill that seems to be the
underbreath of even the hottest day, when I know that global warming
may send our planet into a deep freeze even before my remaining years
run out, then I think about what it is that truly matters to me. Not
just as a human, but as an American.
I want a leader who can love
us. And, truthfully, by our collective behaviour, we have made it hard
to demand this. We are as we are, imperfect to the max, racist and
sexist and greedy above all; still, I feel we deserve leaders who love
us. We will not survive more of what we have had: leaders who love
nothing, not even themselves. We know they don't love themselves
because if they did they would feel compassion for us, so often lost,
floundering, reeling from one bad thought, one horrid act to another.
Killing, under order, folks we don't know; abusing children of whose
existence we hadn't heard; maiming and murdering animals that have done
us no harm.
I would say that, in my lifetime, it was only the
Kennedys, in national leadership, who seemed even to know what
compassion meant; certainly John, and then Bobby, were unafraid to grow
an informed and open heart. (After he left the White House, President
Carter blossomed into a sheltering tree of peace, quite admirably.) I
was a student at a segregated college in Georgia when John Kennedy was
assassinated. His was a moral voice, a voice of someone who had
suffered; someone who, when looking at us in the south, so vulnerable,
so poor, so outnumbered by the violent racists surrounding us, could
join his suffering with ours. The rocking chair in which he sat
reminded us that he was somehow like us: feeling pain on a daily basis
and living a full-tilt life in spite of it. And Bobby Kennedy, whom a
mentor of mine, Marian Wright (later Edelman), brought to Mississippi
years later. He had not believed there were starving children in the
United States. Wright took him to visit the delta. Kneeling before
these hungry children in the Mississippi dirt and heat, he wept. We
were so happy to have those tears. Never before had we witnessed
compassion in anyone sent out to lead us.
The present
administration and too many others before it have shown the most clear
and unapologetic hatred for the American people. A contempt for our
minds, our bodies and souls that is so breathtaking most Americans have
numbed themselves not to feel it. How can they do this or that awful
unthinkable thing, we ask ourselves and each other, knowing no one in
power will ever bother to answer us. I'm sure we, the American people,
are the butt of jokes by those in power. Our suffering not making a
dent in their pursuit of goals that almost always bring more tragedy
and degradation to our already fragile, disintegrating republic.
Sometimes,
reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of
Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write
a sentence. The money for their education has gone to blow off someone
else's intelligent and beautiful head. Visiting a hospital, I see sick
and frightened people who have no clue whether they will get the care
they need or whether it will be 15 minutes of an incompetent
physician's opinion. If we were loved there would be a doctor free of
charge, on every block, with time to listen to us. Visiting our
schools, I see no one has seriously thought about teaching Americans
what to eat, just as no one at the national helm insists that we take
sex education seriously and begin to unencumber our planet of the
projected hordes (Earth's view) of coming generations She can no longer
tolerate.
Our taxes are collected without fail, with no input
from us; sometimes, because we lack jobs, paid with money we have to
borrow. Our children are sent places they never dreamed of visiting, to
harm and make enemies of people who, prior to their arrival, had
thought well of them. Kind, smart, freedom-loving Americans.
When
we are offered a John McCain, who is too old for the job (and I cherish
old age and old men but not to lead the world when it is ailing), or a
George Bush, or a Sarah Palin, how unloved we are as Americans becomes
painfully plain. McCain talks of war with the nostalgia and
forgetfulness of the very elderly; Palin talks of forcing the young to
have offspring they neither want nor can sustain; both of them feel at
ease, apparently, with the game in which their candidacy becomes more
of a topic of discussion than whether the planet has a future under
their leadership.
Where does this leave us average Americans, who
feel the chill of global warming, the devastation of war, the terror of
the food crisis, the horror of advancing diseases? Hopefully with a
sense of awakening: that we have had few opportunities to be led by
those who have the capacity to care for us, to love us, and that we, in
our lack of love for ourselves, have, too often, not chosen them.
Perhaps with the certainty that though we are as we are and sorely
imperfect, we still deserve someone in leadership who "gets" us, and
that this self-defeating habit of accepting our leaders' contempt need
not continue. Maybe with the realisation that we, the people, are truly
the leaders, and that we are the ones we have been waiting for.
I
write on September 9, my father's birthday. A black farmer in Georgia,
he risked his life to vote in the 1930s for a "new deal". If he had
lived and not died in his early 60s of overwork, ill health and
heartbreak, he would be 100 years old in 2009. Voting in November of
2008 for a candidate with heart I will honour his faith.
With all due respect, those of us who have urgent illnesses, who have lost our jobs, our healthcare, our pensions, who have been foreclosed on, who bear the burden of care for an aging parent or disabled family member, or who are elderly ourselves and living on a fixed and dwindling income, do not yet have the luxury of third-party choice. It's by no means a given that Oregon will go overwhelmingly for Obama: I live in Lebanon, and you'd think this town was the Deep South in terms of how "a candidate of color" is referred to (and this is not even eastern Oregon). Take nothing for granted. Keep walking door-to-door until your socks fall off.
There are today only two choices, sad to say. The hard, brutal cash reality today---until we repair our broken two-party system---dictates that we either vote for Obama (we can lean on him later to address our concerns), or we can let our vote default to McCain (more war, more under-insured and avoidable deaths, more foreclosures, more drilling, more environmental damage, the list goes on). Our lives don't.
Let the country really crash to teach it a lesson? Two words should scare us all: "Supreme Court."
Our country is at stake. Better to work from within to influence your local party, and keep working afterwards to bring about instant-runoff voting -- I'll work with you. We all should, so that we can get the pro-peace and pro-justice candidates high office deserves.
I have refrained from putting my political judgements on the Alternatives to War list serve. I don't want to offend too many people and ideally peace shouldn't be a partisan issue. However the subject is broached so I'll have my say and then return to my normal inhibitions.
I don't believe any progressive voter in Oregon should waste their vote by voting for one of the imperialist candidates. First, I don't know if the "lesser of two evils" choice is ever appropriate. Our bipartisan electoral system is broken, so maybe a collosal failure would actually help to bring pressure for instant run off voting. Maybe I don't believe this, but it's an argument.
Secondly, the presidential election in Oregon is only an opinion poll. Your vote in Oregon has zero effect on the outcome of the presidential election. Oregon's 7 electoral votes has never determined the outcome in the electoral college. Actually in 1876 the outcome was within the range where Oregon's electoral votes would have made the difference, but that was a rigged vote decided by Congress, not by the electoral college. If Oregon had gone Democrat, congress would have just disqualified electors from another southern state to maintain the Republican victory.
Even if your vote for Nader or McKinney caused McCain to win Oregon, the election would still be decided by "big" state winner-take-all elections.
Lastly, Obama is going to win Oregon anyway. The meager campaign efforts and lack of media attention guarantee that the large majority of voters will never have the opportunity to even consider voting for an anti-imperialist candidate.
So my advice, which you are free to ignore or respond to is:
DON'T WASTE YOUR VOTE ON IMPERIALIST CANDIDATES!
Make a statement with your Oregon Presidential opinion ballot. Vote for Cynthia McKinney, or Ralph.
It is a common belief, and a cliche, that "everything" is connected. In this case, I’m not referring to the (abstract though realistic-sounding) pebble tossed into a pond, but to the state of our environment, our energy resources, our health, our intra-community relations, and our foreign relations...and we could add others. But here I argue that health and health care fits with issues of US foreign policy and empire, and our peace community’s desire for cooperative relationships, and how working on energy and environment issues could contribute to working toward global peace.
Certainly, the unsteady, dangerous state of the environment contribute to lack of positive health, to cancers, to skeletal problems, to heart disorders. Not having a sense of security that, should a sickness come our way, there is a safety net, a way to address the health issue and to secure the family from economic collapse, generally NOT having security means we are on edge, feeling like we are living on borrowed time, one paycheck or one minor health problem away from disaster. Such feelings do not make it easy to participate in the body politic, do not make it easy to participate on an equal footing, do not make it easy to get up off our duffs and go to the vigil, etc. etc.
On environmental issues, it is good that we are reminded to use low-watt bulbs, to insulate our houses, to bike or drive hybrid or electric cars, to install solar panels on our roofs, etc. But how many of us hold the "defense" department or "homeland security" or for that matter, our sheriffs and our police to these standards. Yet the testing and use of weapons surely must be the most egregious consumer of resources, and the greatest contributor to carbon loss on this planet. These are the ultimate wasters – of resources, time, energy, human and animal life, etc. We need to hold our war makers accountable for ALL of their wasting and for the mis-education of our youth as well. Diversion of those resources for war toward an enhanced infrastructure, and for designing a real health care system for the people in this country is an obvious inter-connection.
It’s election time–time to push these hard questions on our legislators, in the city, the county, the state, and the nation.
It seems that issues that beset us, the peace-makers of this country, are circular—our government is systemically corrupt and individually corrupt, corporations and individuals almost indistinguishable in goals and actions, and information provided to us, the public, spoon-fed from those same individuals and corporations. Elections are corrupt and since government officials appoint judges, they too are–in some cases—tainted or suspect. The establishment (so-called) feeds us fear and mis-information, often dis-information, and the circle continues; the public sometimes heroically surfaces and its cries echo across the countryside, but then these cries subside as we all go back to work, or to our families, or go off to hide and try to save our souls.
So: where to start? Many possibilities exist. Right now, I’m advocating working toward freeing our communication media. I’m talking mainly here of local outlets, of local radio programs specifically—let others (and I hope they will!!) liberate our tv, our print media, our personal communications. But we all have to choose where we put our efforts.
Recently in Corvallis, articles and letters were written about the death of a former radio host who reputedly, a few decades ago, offered a local radio show that included a community bulletin board and that responded to community needs and interests. Many people enjoyed that contact via the radio waves and – now that corporations own most of the radio stations and offer automated and impersonal programming – miss the daily contact with a human being and miss the information about their neighbors and their community. This indicates to me that not just the "peace-niks" of the community, but all of us, could respond to a truly local radio presence, and it could unite us.
Currently the Federal Communications Commission, dominated by 3 Republicans (of 5 on the commission, the other 2 people dissent from them and want to go back to a time when the FCC, fulfilling its mandate, required broadcasters to provide public service for their use of the public airwaves, and did not favor monopolies controlling information), is moving to extend the right of information monopolies to control more and more media. Its rules thus are cutting back the public’s right to read, to hear, to enjoy "alternative" media, alternative in the sense of being something different from the canned accounts and perspectives of the rulers—and could provide varied content, varied styles, varied stimulation.
In the early days of the country, alternative media might be a printing press with a newspaper, well within the possibilities of a young, relatively poor entrepreneur such as Benjamin Franklin to provide — but no more. Yet if regulations were changed, given the internet, given the possibility of low-power fm radio stations, these possibilities, in different shapes and styles of course, could still exist. It is therefore imperative that all of us do all in our power (write Congress-folk, FCC commissioners; work for a totally new and different administration at all levels, federal and state and local) to achieve these goals.
Right now, to me, though there are MANY efforts that all of us need to be and want to be involved in, these seem paramount. Somehow, some way, some of us must break through the circle that binds us.
The world is heating up with potential dire consequences - major cities underwater, dangerous weather patterns emerging and agriculture around the world threatened. So what is the number one topic in presidential debates? Illegal immigration.
Nineteen fanatics murdered thousands and destroyed billions in property on September 11, 2001. It was a criminal act of enormous proportion. But instead of treating it as a crime, we started a war against a country that had nothing to do with the act. Iraq, once a nation with a thriving middle class, but with a nasty leader, is a wreck. It was a country where people of differing religions lived in relative harmony but now, thanks to the US invasion, is rife with hatred So lets talk about illegal immigrants.
Our economy is in tatters as China, India and the Emirates hold billions of dollars in US debt. Major manufacturing has been shipped offshore so that "made in the USA" is becoming increasingly anachronistic. Personal, corporate and government debt is at a level that is unsurpassed and China is becoming the world's number one economy. Russia, only a few years ago was struggling to find direction but is now awash in dollars. So what do we ask the future leader of the free world? "What would you do about illegal immigration?"
Our personal freedom is rapidly being eroded as our emails are siphoned off to government computers. The Military Commissions Act cast aside the Constitution and the principle of habeas corpus, which protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment. It also gave the president absolute power to designate enemy combatants, and to set his own definitions for torture. But what about illegal immigrants?
Health care is administered first to those with good insurance or cash, plenty of it. If you have neither, tough. In New York, the financial, literary and artistic capital of the world, there are those who sleep on grates under cardboard.
Illegal immigration is a problem with no solution but strong opinions. Therefore it is an ideal subject for debate. People get stirred up about it. This nation of immigrants has a long history of animosity towards immigrants whether they were Italians, Irish, Jews, Russians, Chinese or anybody else who didn't look and talk like us. Eventually, they were assimilated and made the United States a stronger, more vibrant nation. But illegal immigration has nothing to do with the problems that we, and the next president will face.