This morning, I finished reading The Audacity of Hope. I'm very glad I had not read this book before I joined the Barack Obama campaign in 2007 - any shred of objectivity I had about him would have certainly been clouded. It's a book that I wish never ended - he's a man I wish could be cloned and scattered, by the millions, across the globe. Even if you don't share Obama's politics, one must admire his honesty and his attempts to construct a Third Way of living a life of political purpose - one that is "devoid of petty ambitions and narrow calculations". His writing is shockingly honest and as I worked my way through it, I began to understand the incredible hard work and strength of spirit it takes to mould oneself into a visionary thinker.
There are some serious *moments* in this book. You know, those instances when you're racing towards the fullstop at the end of the paragraph, breathless because your mind is racing, teetering at the very cusp of enlightenment - that millisecond when you are paralyzed with awe, when you have to take a moment to just breathe, to bask in the wondrous nature of compassionate intellect. Obama is the kind of writer who can produce just that kind of effect - he effortlessly ties together lessons learnt from living with an emasculated maternal grandfather with those he learns from a hard-fought (and, in the end, an "embarrassing", failed) race for a Senate seat in 2000 with those he learns from an Army General in the Green Zone at the peak of the war in (or "on" depending on your political biases) Iraq.
I think, more than anything else, it's a work that made me look more closely at who I am as a citizen of an increasingly worrisome world. Everyone has one of those books - for some it's a religious text, for some it's the album of letters that an ailing mother once wrote to them and for others it's the words of a woman/man they deeply admire - the book that makes you see where you've been, where you stand and where you are headed. The process began pretty early on in the book - page 30, to be precise - for me. Reflecting on his own youth, Obama says:
"Mainly my understanding of the sixties came as a result of my own investigations, as my adolescent rebellion sought justification in the political and cultural changes that by then had already begun to ebb. In my teens, I became fascinated with the Dionysian, up-for-grabs quality of the era, and through books, film, and music, I soaked in a vision of the sixties very different from the one my mother talked about: images of Huey Newton, the '68 Democratic National Convention, the Saigon airlift, and the Stones at Altamont. If I had no immediate reasons to pursue revolution, I decided nevertheless that in style and attitude I, too, could be a rebel, unconstrained by the received wisdom of the over-thirty crowd.
Eventually, my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into cant: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized."
Something about this passage made a dormant part of me wake up, shake itself and smell the Java. Perhaps it was how easily I could identify with the chasing-our-own-tails dorm-room conversations - Brown students' conversations usually revolve around some combination of the following ideas: American/Western hegemony and the postcolonial identity, gender bias and sexual liberation, artistic/intellectual license and reconstructions of truth (with a small t), 'enlightened' forms of romance (which are no different from 'normal' stories of puppy love except for the fact that the people narrating the stories have taken far too many literature/literary theory classes for their own good -- yours truly included) - which eventually ended in ideas that, at the time, seemed so revolutionary and individualistic. But in retrospect, are merely re-hashed articulations of things that have already been explored and re-explored in a thousand different ways by a million young liberals before us.
Barack Obama's book gave me much-needed perspective on the danger of big ideas marinating in their own juices, while the thinkers run around like headless chickens. Since stepping out of the Ivy League bubble, I've seen people (once again, self included) go one of two ways - a) they realize that the "real world" is just as gruesome as everyone makes it out to be -- so, every man for himself. Enlightenment be damned - fools are those who do not heed the call - "Capitalism zindabad"! b) they continue to pursue ambitions of being indie filmmakers, write for obscure magazines and believe that they are truly better than everyone else (the quintessential artiste's holier-than-thou attitude that is intolerable at best, a crime against humanity at worst) as they are contributing to the world in more meaningful ways. OK, so that's a gross oversimplification of people's life choices, if there ever was one. But, you get the gist of what I'm trying to say. It's folly to think that we have to fit one category or the other - it is as easy to be a part of the System and create change as it is easy to be outside the System and be utterly ineffectual to change. I think it's time we seriously convinced ourselves that it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing - wealth-or-human-rights, Ferrari-or-environmental-action, Matisse-or-fight-against-hunger - if we don't want it to be.
Obama tells many stories of people who use their limited means to create change. There's Mac, in downtown Chicago, whose workforce is made up, almost entirely (read as 95%), of ex-felons -- giving people a second chance to reclaim their dignity. There are the anti-abortion activists who brave the bitter cold in DC to hold Obama's hand and tell him that they support and believe in the goodness of all of his liberal politics but also wonder why he doesn't see in the Bible what they do. And then, there's the Republican senator who, despite party pressure, chooses to vote for a Senate bill that restricts weapon proliferation and the military-industrial complex's hold on American taxpayers' money.
There are many lessons to be learnt from The Audacity of Hope (I have 18 A-ha! moments marked down with Post-It notes) - but, I think I ended the book having gained an invaluable lesson in battling the oppressive disillusioning powers of modern-day life. A simple equation (Pythagoras aint got nothing on me lol):
little people x (big ideas + vision + a whole lotta determination) = Change.
How about we pick our booties off the comfy couch and do some serious manual labour (I can hear at least 3 of my closest girlfriends gasp audibly) in and for the world. Let's think of "those like Lincoln and King, who ultimately laid down their lives in the service of perfecting an imperfect union. And all the faceless, nameless men and women, slaves and soldiers and tailors and butchers, constructing lives for themselves and their children and grandchildren, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, to fill in the landscape of our collective dreams".
Why not want to be a part of that? Why, exactly, not?
With many dreams,
S
- Tune for the moment: "Let's Get Lifted" - John Legend
