Wedding::Marriage as Election::Term

I love that Obama, during one of the proudest moments of recent American history and in a moment of victory, said soberly that what is required is work, healing, and a willingness to listen.

I needed hope, recently. I imagine I am not the only one. For many years, I considered myself a Pollyanna – it felt to me that things were getting better, two steps forward to one step back, but always getting better. Slavery still exists, but slave trading is not a respected corporate goal. Sexism still exists, but your boss can no longer chortle to his collegues that lippy broads like yourself just need a strong hand to keep you in line. Homophobia still exists, but at least in urban centres, you can have parades of celebration and joy where once there was mainly isolation and fear.

Recently, my hope has faltered. I didn’t see me making change. I saw me talking with people who thought like me. I saw more of the same.

But I’m hopeful again now.  Of course, in part, because a black man was elected! Yes.

But this hope is greater and likely due to my age. Obama’s is not just a black man, but also best leader I’ve seen in my lifetime.

MLK, Trudeau, JFK – these were the leaders, the personalities, the orators that I knew mattered. And they were history, to me. They’d moved people to be their better selves. I didn’t know any politicians like that. I was born during Watergate.

My whole life has been lived in the shadow of Watergate, of all the Gates – there has been very little hope from leadership. No heroes, no visionaries. It’s been pandering and scandal, rinse and repeat – or, like Clinton and Chrétien, guys who did their work pretty well, but didn’t do a lot of leading.

People have been doing none-the-less, and change has happened; we’ve been working, organizing, writing, campaigning. When I was growing up the fact I knew gay folks was one of those weird things about me. Now, not weird – at least, not in urban centres. I grew up as Oprah got rich and powerful: she was at least an example that a vagina and a skin colour did not make you a brain-dead mouth-breathing baby machine. Like her or hate her, she was neither too stupid nor too emotional to make shitloads of money and have shitloads of influence.

There were things, though, that seemed too big for us to do alone. Like the Cold War. Like Global Warming.

Leaders need to do on these things. Leaders need to LEAD on these things. Governments and corporations have to move responsibly to act on big issues, because there’s only so much your average consumer can do alone. In aggregate, we are powerful, but we have to move in aggregate. That’s what a leader is for. To help move us in aggregate. A bad leader is a scary thing; he moves people, in the aggregate, to do things they might not otherwise.

So you’ve got to watch your leaders. And that means Obama, too. Obama, who does not support gay-marriage, who is making tricky decisions with his health care plan, who is hawkish in Afghanistan. You got to watch that gorgeous rhetoric; check it for pins.

Generally, I’m pretty confident that he’s leaving lots of room for movement. The man does not back away from saying things: he is conciliatory, but he’s not without substance.

I am living by choice as small a footprint as I can in a city that has facilitated that: but there is simply not enough space for all the people of North America to choose as I’m choosing, even if they all decided tomorrow to do so. Infrastructure has to change. So power has to help change the infrastructure for the aggregate.

Individuals can prepare the soil, the ground, for big change by changing the culture that underpins power. But once that’s done, power has to respond. It has to grow out of the culture around it, and not stay a cynical hothouse impostor camouflaging itself to look like it belongs, using wedge issues to drive the aggregate apart, convincing us all to stay insulated and insular, teaching us to argue rather than move.

I’ve grown up in Reaganomics and trickle-down theory. I’ve lived in the idea that if we all just work hard we can get somewhere fabulous economically for ourselves, and that when we all operate with our own greed as primary it will somehow work out for the best. I’d never bought it; I’ve lived in too many communes. There has to be structure, and there has to be a common goal, or it ends up turning into a Lord-O’-The-Flies scenario pretty quickly. Selfishness pretty much always fucked it up.

And we’re all in a commune, of sorts. Divided we fall on this wee planet of ours – we are an interconnected, interdependent ecosystem.

Since looking out for number one was the dominant theme of the day in the world’s biggest superpower, things looked simply too big for us small individuals on the ground to handle.

Obama IS radical, coming out of the States. He’s radical because he’s saying: think of your society, think of your world. He’s radical because he’s saying: put down your fear and hatred of them, those who seem unabashedly racist, or sexist, or homophobic, and see the best in common goals  – and in being near them, in being part of them, help them change.

He’s radical because he’s saying ‘be the aggregate, and we will all move this boulder together.’

That was the reason for all of my tears of hope, and of joy.

The culture, though, it needs to keep changing. The soil needs to be worked, enriched. This is a matter of making it easy for each other to get the work that needs doing, done. To make sure that human rights are respected – that the rule of law matters again, that prisoners are innocent until proven guilty and are guaranteed a fair trial, that married same-sex couples have all the rights that married straight couples to. To make sure that this ailing planet gets all the help it needs to become well again.

That will take a lot of moving. We have to move together.

Comments

  1. Run for office, wench!

  2. Yeah. Your rhetoric brings all the boys to the yard.

  3. Damn right, it’s better than yours!

    Damnit, Liz, you have cracked me up in a most unseemly manner.

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