As I suspect was true most everywhere, the interstitial space between our desks and offices yesterday was sparking with anticipation and anxiety about the election. The leadership at the Center is abundantly tight about keeping politics and electioneering out our work, and we do, but we’re also intensely human humans and, on a human level, yesterday was like no other I can remember. I told both my children last night that there would never be another day on the planet like yesterday, the day the United States of America elected a black man to be President, and not by a small margin. Just as a father, I’m so grateful that they are both of age (15 and nearly 10) to remember this day as long as they live, come what may.
Come what may.
The world has changed so much in eight years, and the deep global, economic, and Constitutional problems we now face put into some doubt whether anybody, even someone as smart and talented as Barack Obama, will be up to the leadership required to solve them.
But there’s at least one thing I’m very confident Obama can change and will.
It’s the way we talk to each other.
In the 1980s and into the early 1990s, it was actually possible to turn on a radio and listen to what was then called “news-talk” and actually hear thoughtful people discuss local and national issues without it being a blood sport. One of my early profiles for Spokane Magazine was of a then-young Alex Wood, a former navy officer who hosted a popular Sunday Morning talk show on KREM radio. Wood is now a state legislator (re-elected yesterday) but, whatever you think of him as a politician, he was a brilliant radio man. He knew how to talk (and listen) to people of all political and moral persuasions and engage them in remarkable ways. His old job, in commercial radio, is so rare that it basically doesn’t exist any more.
The personalities who changed radio in America were Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannitty, Bill O’Reilly and their imitators. Limbaugh, by himself, is credited with saving AM radio. But, in the process, he and other right-wing radio hosts converted the medium to something of a medieval carnival. People really don’t talk to each other on commercial radio anymore. Hosts like Limbaugh and Rusty Humphries dismember those who disagree with them and make spectacles of shouting at their “guests.”
I remember when this happened and I still remember my friend Heidi Gann, a Spokane artists and civic activist, telling me a decade ago she just couldn’t listen to talk radio. “It gives you brain cancer,” she told me.
The problem is not with disagreements, as we’ll never run out of those. The “cancer” is the utterly pyrrhic rhetoric that one of my colleagues here at CFJ described Monday as “cruelty for sport.” Somehow, we reached a point where it became not just accepted practice to assault someone’s patriotism because he or she disagreed with you, but the audience came to expect it, and even demand it. Thus, we commercialized it. Stephen Colbert, in his masterful Bill O’Reilly caricature, allowed us to laugh back at this, and, lately, Keith Olberman has been building an audience by shouting back.
But what Obama has been doing, and did so well from Grant Park late last night, was to absorb all the hateful garbage that has been tossed in his direction and elegantly wipe himself off and say, even though I didn’t get your vote, I’ll listen to you, and I need your help.
I can only imagine the strength and grace it takes to have done that. But, more to the point, there are already promising indications that we may be getting past this, that with Obama’s eloquence and graceful candidacy through the gauntlet of rubbish he’s had to endure, the politics of demonization will begin to at least diminish, because it’s so clearly not getting us anywhere.
To me, one of the remarkable news items in this political year, came right at the end. It was reported in yesterday’s Albuquerque Journal that the entire board of a county Republican women’s organization in New Mexico resigned. . They resigned because their chairwoman refused to step down after she reportedly denounced Obama as a “muslim socialist” and wrote a letter to another newspaper declaring “Muslims are our enemies.”
I think the message was “enough already.”
Let’s hope so because there are some really important things the nation needs to re-think with some urgency. To begin with, ideological simplicities about economic policy are out the window when the eminent former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan tells the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (as he did two weeks ago) that he and others are “in a state of shocked disbelief” that the nation’s bankers’ “self-interest” in protecting “shareholder equity” wasn’t enough for the nation’s banking system to successfully regulate itself and prevent bringing the system to the verge of collapse. And, of course, it was the rapturously ideological Bush Administration, led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (the former chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs) who quickly threw off the laissez faire dinner jackets and began pouring hundreds of billions of public dollars into the banks. Now, is this the government that conservative activist Grover Norquist wants to make so small that he can “drown” in a bathtub?
The point is, any reasonable person ought to conclude that we can’t have the conversations to address these and other problems if we don’t begin talking to each other without having the unmitigated gall to demand that those who disagree with us be banished and humiliated. It requires not just a conversation but it requires something we talk a lot about at the Center for Justice. It requires a relationship. It requires a relationship in which however much we disagree with one another, that we don’t harbor homicide in our hearts, and that we love each other’s children.
That’s where I think Obama can take us. It’s a hope and a prayer.
Finally, Jesse Jackson’s tear-streaked face was just one in the crowd last night in Grant Park. But what a knee-buckling image.
I’m old enough to remember April 4, 1968, the day Jackson was with Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, when a sniper’s bullet ended Rev. King’s life on the narrow balcony of the Lorraine Motel. I don’t know of a more dismal day to have been an American.
But I know that Jackson was there, and I know what he and so many others put on the line to get our country from Memphis forty years ago to that moment we all experienced last night, regardless of who we voted for. I feel so blessed that Rev. Jackson and his fellow compatriots in the American civil rights struggle, who gave blood and loved ones for this great purpose, still walk amongst us, and that they share their country, our country, with me and my children.
–Tim Connor
