A Return To Greatness
Obama caught my eye in the grocery store. It was the caption.
“What we need now is not a leader to assure us of our greatness, but one who will challenge us to reassert it.”
This is an article I want to read not just for Obama but also to see what the author thinks we need to reassert (which he never really quite does). But it also begs the questions, “What made America as a nation great in the first place?”
Because we’re talking about politics, the author begins by calling himself a cynic or “one who believes that only selfishness motivates human actions and who disbelieves in or minimizes selfless acts or disinterested points of view,” which is odd. Why begin with such a negative statement? But it becomes very clear why the author calls himself a cynic.
His initial criticisms of Obama to me are wanting for many reasons, chief of which is that he’s asking him to bleed in a season that bleeding is uncalled for. We don’t want a President who intentionally crashes and burns before he gets to office.
“There is nothing about Obama that bleeds, not publicly. Everything about him that bleeds he left back between the covers of his autobiography. Look for it there, not in this campaign. But mainly, he’s not leading a movement because he’s telling people that, through him, and through their belief in him, they can reclaim the country’s lost greatness, as though the country he’s talking to didn’t hock all that stuff in the first place so it could afford guns and burglar alarms. He’s asking it to value what it’s already peddled on the cheap.”
Not the highest view of his readership, I would suggest. But the author has essentially lost hope not just in the possibility or potential of Obama but in politics as well. The author continues,
“But politics has lost its imagination and it is dead to metaphor, and the cynic sees the water tower that says “Freedom,” and it’s only a measure of how utterly lost he is.
Convince me, he says to himself.
Convince me that I’m wrong. Convince me that there’s enough left that’s worth saving. Convince me that there are enough people left who care enough to save it.”
And it is this “convince me” posture that is the most telling. Convince me begins without participation. Convince me sits on the sidelines waiting to jump on the bandwagon until the the winning team has already won the game. Convince me sits back waiting for the cost to be so low that there really is no cost other than skepticism. This is not what made America great.
But the cynic touches on why he and many others are cynical. His viewpoint appears to be that we have lost our sense of freedom.
“More than anything else, the presidential election ongoing is — or, as a right, ought to be — about ending an era of complicity. There is no point anymore in blaming George Bush or the men he hired or the party he represented or the conservative movement that energized that party for what has happened to this country in the past seven years. They were all merely the vehicles through whom the fear and the lassitude and the neglect and the dry rot that had been afflicting the democratic structures for decades came to a dramatic and disastrous crescendo.”
He essentially concludes his diatribe with this,
“The people of the United States have been accessorial in the murder of their country. Someone will have to measure the wreckage. Someone will have to walk through the ruins. Someone will have to count the cost.”
The article does little to point to what made us great in the first place, which kind of surprised me given the title. But hidden in the subtext is actually the answer. It is a quote from Pastor Alvin Love that reveals the origins of greatness AND one of the big reasons I think people are supporting Obama. Love says,
“Pastor Alvin Love was finishing up Sunday service, and Pastor Love talked about the young Barack Obama, who’d come to him to do community organizing through the various churches in the area. ‘Barack kind of broke down those barriers for us, because it was easy for us to get into our own agenda,’ Love recalled. ‘And it was all the neighborhoods on the South Side, and all the pastors were saying the same thing, so finding out that we had more in common than we thought was an eye-opening experience.’”
And it is here, hidden in the line, “broke down those barriers for us, because it was easy for us to get into our own agenda”, that lies what has made America great in the first place.
America began with two essential frameworks: our God given dignity and the willingness to sacrifice deeply for that dignity. What made our country great was always our ability to tear down what separated us and fight together for that collective dignity. The founding fathers consistently asked for sacrifice for the sake of the greater good, which was embedded in our dignity. They were willing to fight for it, even unto death, to remove people from oppression. They understood that love and sacrifice was the defining ethic that guided their endeavors. They also understood that we were broken human beings, prone to “our own agenda”, so they created checks and balances and a system of law designed to govern people. But it was always the call to love and sacrifice that defined what move our country forward.
What made America great in the first place was not our cynicism, or even our ability to call out what was wrong with the old system. It was our capacity to gather together in the spirit of unity, which required love and sacrifice. This is the call of sacrifice and what has always made great leaders. Kennedy’s most famous speech included the line,
“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your own country.”
Inspiration always appeals to the best in who we are as human beings. It reveals who we want to be, not just who we are. We want leaders who ask us to think outside of our own agenda and love our neighbor. We may not like it but we want it. Our greatness has always resided in our leaders ability to get us to think outside of our own agenda, one that is inclusive of our neighbor. Ultimately we want leaders who can help us grow into mature citizens, one who don’t need our government to tell us what to do. We want leaders who can help us self-govern.
Benjamin Zander, the noted conductor said,
“(The conductor) depend for his power on his ability to make other people powerful.”
And this is one of the central reasons why I like Obama. The Yes, We Can video highlighted this. It’s filled with hope because of the call to think outside of ourselves. Obama’s appeal doesn’t reside in the fact that he’s black, or from Harvard, or that he’s a great orator. His appeal resides in his call to become better human beings. His speeches are filled with the possibility of participation rather than jaded cynicism. Anyone can be a cynic but only the great can make people think outside of themselves.
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Rick
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Darren
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Jonathan Brink
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Rick
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Jonathan Brink
