Yesterday marked a series of signal events in our history, the foremost of which was the election of a young, African-American man as the 44th President of the United States. His election generated immediate hope and energy in a country starved for both at a time when we will need all of the hope and energy we can muster to deal with several daunting tasks, any one of which, if taken alone, would be considered a formidable challenge for a new President in ordinary times.
Most importantly, Barrack Obama’s election marks the beginning of the end of an era during which the nation’s very soul has been challenged by direct attacks upon our most fundamental and cherished beliefs – a period when our government deemed the use of torture to be legitimate in the pursuit of goals for which consensus was lacking and little attempt was made to develop one; when our government sacrificed our personal rights in the belief that all should feel safer in the cocoon of an idealized state that more nearly matches that of the Third Reich than the rough and tumble of traditional American democracy; when our government evidenced a disgust, dislike and disdain for the rest of this wonderfully chaotic world in which we live, simply because “they” didn’t think like us and, one strongly suspects, didn’t look like us. In short, we are about to complete a period in which the American dream was supplanted by a nightmare of our own making – a Bushmare, if you will. A nightmare wherein we engaged in persistently lower standards of national conduct in the pursuit of presidentially declaimed national goals shared only by the few and the self-appointed and promoted by the rank manipulation of our collective fears.
Having acquired more than a few gray hairs due to the passage of time and from the”enjoyment” of the vicissitudes of life, I have learned a simple, stark truth: not all of our time in this world is pleasant. Following the first of several dark episodes in my life, I was struck by the fact that while I seemed to have weathered it, I hadn’t learned anything from it since I promptly repeated the seminal mistake and entered into a second period of darkness not dissimilar from the first – except with respect its intensity. Repeated stupidities are generally far less satisfactory than the first time in which we engage in them. This second period of brain damage made me realize, however, that there is a way to profit from darkness. Since periods of darkness are, by definition, not enjoyable or fun, one has to find other ways to profit from them by knowledge gained and/or lessons learned. These periods can make us wiser and stronger simply because it is, in fact, possible to learn from our mistakes. But to do so, we must take the time to engage in the necessary sober reflection to do so.
So it is in this spirit that I offer the following as possible lessons to be learned from our national Bushmare. We are about to enter a period of unprecedented change, and not just the kind of change promised by politicians everywhere. Are there lessons to be learned from our Bushmare? These are my nominations:
1. No society can succeed by acting contrary to, or from the misapplication of, its shared core values. The discord, animosity and calamity that results from acting contrary to our national cultural identity has no redeeming qualities. At best, such behavior can only be divisive. At worst, such behavior bankrupts society, causing the loss of national pride and, eventually, the destruction of the will to continue.
2. Never give away easily that which was so hard won. Hard won rights take centuries to define and develop, and we cannot be so careless as to disavow them within the space of a single political generation. The resulting slippage can only be erased by the efforts of many subsequent generations – merely to return to a condition we once enjoyed. Therefore, we must be a responsible steward and recognize the value of our predecessors’ sacrifices by using them to shape and attain our goals, by furthering the effort they began during our time in charge, and by leaving theirs and our legacy intact so that our children may serve as stewards in their time.
3. Understand that basic human rights are not merely important to the American psyche, but are an integral part of its very warp and woof. Recognize that personal liberties are not merely a convenience, but are, rather, the singular essence which unifies the diversity which is our only common heritage – sons and daughters of immigrants of every conceivable variety and Native Americans alike. Understand further that when we diminish the human rights of non-Americans, we diminish our own honor and integrity while attacking the basic fabric that holds our society together.
4. Realize that we are not a super-power able to run roughshod over the world; that no single nation can, in a world of such variety and vastness, seek to impose its will on others without severely damaging its own internal stability. Recognize the Bush Doctrine for the basic threat to our internal security and peace that it is.
5. Never, never seek cover, security and comfort by allowing our government to preach a form of collective security at the expense of our personal liberties. Never fear the exercise by ourselves or others of our personal liberties, and learn to recognize the joy we share, as a nation, from our sanctification of their exercise.
6. Learn to celebrate, not fear, the panoply of peoples, customs, beliefs, ideas, cultures, religions, nations, and histories, and the respective acts of creativity that led to their existence. In short, listen to life’s cacophony and revel in its rhythms and teachings.
We are now faced with an imperative to change in order to preserve the best of our society. The imperative is not driven by a wish to do better, but by the failure of the basic economic model as practiced for the last 20 to 30 years. This will be a period for which the mythical Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” was invented.
Why it might be a curse to live in such times is beyond me. Change is opportunity. We can each make of it what we will, employing our personal resources to the best of our respective abilities. It is times like this in which we can find the stuff of which we are made.
It is also a time in which we can learn and employ the lessons of the long dark night of our national soul, thereby assuring that the national angst of the last 8 years is not wasted but is employed for our mutual profit.
