Turn on the television, read an op-ed, or even listen to that antiquated radio and you’ll hear commentators and citizens alike subscribing to the theory of how unique this moment is in American history. Barack Obama is going to be the first black President in a nation scarred by slavery. But more than that, this economic crisis presents an opportunity for us to come together and finally tackle our nation’s ills. We can create better schools, better hospitals, and a better foreign policy. And Obama, who consistently projects the best in us, will lead the way. It is this sense of possibility that drives a country on the verge of bankruptcy to devote unprecedented resources to experience “history.” For the wealthy, it means spending fifty thousand dollars on a fancy ball to shake his hand. For the less well off, it means doing whatever it takes to be in our nation’s capital. Even if it means sitting far away, it’ll still be worthwhile because at least you can say you were there. Imagine, instead, if all those resources were spent on carrying out Obama’s aspirations.
If 1.2+ million people were as enthusiastic about solving our nation’s inequities as they were about the inauguration, we’d most certainly have solved them. No child would starve. No student would be denied entrance to school on the basis of cost. No sixty year old would be turned away from a necessary surgery because he or she made too much to qualify for Medicaid yet was too young to qualify for Medicare. Given this, why will everyone in one form or another give a disproportionate amount of their time to hear a variation of a speech we’ve heard so much that it sounds like a bromide?It’s a complex question, but I’ll take my best shot.
We spend the time hearing someone else tell us how we’ll tackle these infinitely daedal quandaries because we want to feel a part of something. If we spent the time individually helping, we’d feel like we were making a marginal difference at best. Yet if everyone is helping, then we might actually be able to make a difference. If one man takes the helm, we can follow him and finally make genuine progress. Any observer of human history, however, understands the egregious failures of collective action. Our selfishness impedes the potential to create the utopia that philosophers and artists have dreamt of ever since we were capable of thought. Anyone who seriously cogitates about it will inevitably have to laugh at the irrationality of it all. 1.2 million celebrating one man’s ability to navigate the political winds better than his opponents. Come on, how does that personally help anyone who isn’t part of Obama’s team or at least tangentially part of politics? It doesn’t. On January 21st we’ll be as rich or poor, happy or unhappy, God hating or fearing as we were on January 20th. We’ll do better or worse based partly on our merit and partly on life’s randomness, not because of some distant man in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
We do it because, simply, we need faith to believe that tomorrow will triumph yesterday. It’s no different than somebody accepting that Jesus Christ died two thousand years ago for our sins. It’s no different than believing you were put here for an ad hoc purpose. It’s rooted in a belief that cannot be proven— something we all share in some fashion or another. Its manifestations vary, but we all share it. Ideally, those who mock liberals for believing so much in Obama would realize that they, in practice, do the same thing in their house of worship. Conversely, those who believe in Obama should admit that doing so makes as much intellectual sense as religion. Of course the cleavage between both sides will not shrink. But hey, that’s the change I’ll dream about on Tuesday.
P.S. If an Obama like figure were about to embark on the Presidency twenty years ago while Barack was at Harvard Law, would he be in D.C. celebrating? We know the Clintons worked on Jimmy Carter’s campaign in 1976, and Obama never has done the equivalent. Then again, there were no compelling Democratic figures in the 1980s while he came of age.
