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There's no dewy-eyed optimism in that article, certainly, but what I found to be a very practical view of the politics of hope.
When people ask me "Kevin, why Obama?" I've found it hard to say simply and quickly all the myriad reasons why I know that he's the right one right now. What I have lately been coming to, though, is this:
For the first half of my life, I have lived in a country where too many people are still discriminated against because of their race or their religion or their gender or their sexual preference; too many children go hungry; too many people have their lives ruined by illness or accident; too many young Americans die on foreign soil for no good reason; and too many good people stand by and let it all happen because they don't believe it can be changed.
This is not because we haven't tried. God knows we've tried. We've fought hard, and long, and with every waking moment and every fiber of our being and every spark of life within us. And we've made some progress, and we've had some victories, and we keep moving forward, but the big things haven't really changed all that much since we all watched them gun down Bobby and Martin and John.
The richest country on earth still can't educate or feed or shelter its most vulnerable citizens, and we still bomb the living shit out of brown or yellow or black or whatever multi-colored third world countries you got, and the politicians still wring their hands or pound their chests, and nobody ever gets a big enough majority to do the right thing instead of what they think is popular. Instead, they still divide us, and make us hate each other out of frustration at our inability to change things, and politics as usual prevails, which means more gridlock, more inertia, more of the same.
As Rachel Maddow points out, when neither side is able to do everything it wants, the vacuum is filled by the agents of the status quo: the corporations, and the lobbyists, and the people who have everything they need or want and the power to keep it, thank you very much.
The fundamental question before us now is whether the second half of our lives will be nothing more than a repeat of the first half. I do not believe that Obama is perfect, or that he is some kind of messiah come to deliver us from evil. He is going to disappoint us. I have no doubt of that. He can't help but disappoint, because he is mud and dust and sweat just like you and me. He's going to make mistakes, and he's going to do things we don't agree with.
But he is maybe, just maybe, going to be able to do the one thing that makes it all worthwhile: change the math. Change the equation. Change the way we do things once and for all. If he can do that, if he can really bring new people to the table, and bring some of the old ones together, then he's got a chance to accomplish some of the things that all of us, young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, all of us agree should be done.
This is the sort of opportunity that only comes along once in a very great while. I wish that wasn't the case, but it is. We had a chance like this only once before in our lifetimes, in the sixties, and we didn't go all the way. Then, as now, the youth of this country led the way, but the older generation in the sixties didn't lift a finger to help them. Quite the opposite, in fact. They beat us up, and shot us dead, and we lost our way. We can not afford to let that happen this time.
I can't stand by and watch another fifty years of this crap. It would be infinitely unbearable to know that I had a chance to help tip the balance, and did nothing. We can't afford to elect someone who only knows how to re-fight the wars of the last fifty years, or who embraces the old familiar mind traps as a badge of honor, no matter how historic her candidacy may be in its own right. Polarization, no matter whose fault, is our enemy right now. This is the moment for something greater. This is the time for our better angels. The window will not be open long. This is the day, right now, when we must decide how we will live the rest of our lives.
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