My Letter to President-elect Barack Obama

[cenacle]

December 13, 2008
Portland, Oregon

Dear President-elect Obama,

I am writing to congratulate you on being elected President of the United States. It was thrilling to be part of your campaign, to witness the hopes your campaign raised translated into a thorough victory on November 4, a clearly enunciated statement by millions repudiating the policies & attitudes ruling the world this past 8 years. George W. Bush’s time is over. He will leave office this coming January a disgraced, humiliated man. A spectacular failure. A would-be King now shown a humbled fool. Between the hopes your campaign spoke toward again & again, & the deep, abiding loathing for Bush, your victory became more & more likely, & then happened.

Wow. It really happened. Since then you have been readying to take office, selecting your Cabinet & others who will join you in Washington, D.C. I was particularly pleased by your choice of Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State. I think she will be terrific in the role of mending international relations, repairing the tattered American image. She is a brilliant woman & I’m sure will work tirelessly for peace & reconciliation. I also admire your commitment to a bi-partisan Cabinet. Some, frankly, do not. Many are progressives, & already halfway off your bandwagon. Don’t want to believe you will keep promises, don’t want to get fooled again. Some talk as though you’re already in office, breaking promises left & right.

Sir, I don’t bear such doubts. I am certain you are intending to keep promises & do good by all. I believe in your intelligence, your heart, & most of all, your empathy toward others. I believe you when you say you wish to be the leader of one nation & will work with any who will work with you, & will listen to all who speak.

I believe there will be both victories & defeats, better & worse days. Bush is soon gone, but his kind—the iniquitous of this world who feed on the suffering of others, their vulnerabilities, sometimes their ignorance—goes on & on. The human soul may pitch toward stars, open-handed to every living being, a mortal thing ringed with countless coronas of musics, even as it may also ignore all sufferings or sensations not its own, take from others while wearing a bland, righteous mask, judge a skin color or a genital kind or a language or a philosophical or a political opinion enough to damn another, burn down his house, annihilate his loved ones, leave him gutted & dying on an empty street.

Thus it can be reasonably said that you continue along others’ steps as much as you begin anew. There will be doubters & those who resist your ideas about one American family, much less one human family or one planetary family. People often will fall back on two questions: what’s in it for me & mine? What do I have to give up for others, & why? Each of us, to some reasonable or unreasonable degree, will be watching how you govern from this perspective. As hard as getting elected was, & as improbable as that victory, what’s to come will utterly overshadow it.

The American economy, & by extension the global economy, has been reduced to a shambles. Two unfinished wars continue in Iraq & Afghanistan. Regional wars threaten in half a dozen parts of the world. The environment’s condition is deteriorating even as powerful interests will try to continue American addiction to foreign oil—not to mention the lack of affordable healthcare for millions.

The litany of woes goes on & on. There is always, frankly, a litany of woes. Mortal things suffer. We love & break up, we are lonely, we are sick, we die. Most of us labor all our lives just to survive, to retire for a few elderly years of sitting in the sunshine, feeling worn out & useless. The elite among us, not among the millions of wage slaves, fare better along the way, but still end up in a box or an urn. Just a prettier one.

What I come back to, what I find the moveable space in all this, what I call the imaginal space of possibilities, is what resides, figuratively at last, in the human heart. What got you elected was not policy so much as a persistent tapping at these secret, precious, vulnerable places. A dark-skinned man has never led this race-wounded nation. A still-young man who grew up poor, fatherless, lived some years overseas, worked very hard & gained his entrance into the finest universities in the land. Well-spoken does not describe your speeches. They cry, they ring, they summon, they urge to heal, to unite. After a dark, bloody, shameful decade, infested with lies, with brutality, with ever-increasing disappointments & diminishing prospects, you stood up & said, “Yes, We Can.” You talked, in words both plain & golden, of hope, of change. You shifted the cultural dialogue from tomorrow’s next calamity to tomorrow’s new possibility. Your opponents mocked you & called your words pretty, empty, delusional. Each one mis-read what people wanted. Each promised to be a knight against encroaching darkness, a parent checking under the bed & in the closets for monsters. You didn’t. You simply said, “Get up, check the closets with me, now under the bed. The worst monsters live in your hearts. Now you remember. Now you know.”

I believe, Mister President-elect, Barack, that you will do well, that you are suited for this great, hard task. You will push this nation & the world as a whole toward smarter, kinder, & eventually more prosperous days. You will lead & inspire. Others will listen, will find a model to emulate in one way or many. As always, what good that happens will not annihilate suffering or selfishness or plain stupidity. Neither fullest moon's beauty nor bloodthirstiest war lasts perpetually. Or perhaps, more accurately, life shifts between them, strangely allows & accommodates both. There will always be beauty. There will always be war.

You know what you have to do, your many tasks, the many expectations, countless possibilities & pitfalls. Mysteries beyond view, unknowable turns of fortune. Tonight, some seven weeks from when you take your oath of office, I am thinking of you with love, with respect, with a deep sense of fraternity with you, & with every possible good wish that you will succeed more often than fail, move the world into clearer air, deeper awareness of our better impulses & of each other. Tonight, I am with you in heart & spirit, I am hopeful, nothing is impossible. We can do this. Yes, we can.

Peace & love,
(RS)

[glowing]

1. You, too, have a beautiful way with words. You calmed my heart.