Change. It's a word I've been hearing a lot of lately. At least when I listen to the things coming from the Barack Obama campaign. It sounds nice. Hey, yeah, change, Ok, I could go for some of that. George Bush is stupid! Whooo, I went to a liberal college and now believe firmly in blue things and things on the left. Yeah, poverty and big business sucks! And screw war. That's totally wack, dude. Ah what? Health Care? Sure, I'm 20 and covered by my parents, who gives a fuck, but yeah Change!
I admit I haven't been much of a politically minded person, well, ever. I didn't even vote in the 2004 election. I spouted the same old stuff I remember a lot of other people saying: the candidates are the same, my vote doesn't even matter anyway, who cares, what can the president really do, no matter who wins my life won't change much, blah blah, apathy is cool, blah blah. I didn't vote, and it turns out that, technically it didn't really matter after all. John Kerry won Washington, lost the election. Had I voted, nothing else would have changed. And it certainly wouldn't have Changed. Still, I've gotta think that my heart was in the wrong place. And yet, to continue qualifying myself here, I'm not too ashamed. I was 18, which is young, and having just recently come from a place where my biggest social concern was where in the South Lot I was going to park my car in the morning, all of a sudden affecting a massive political interest would have been just that; an affectation. I wasn't ready to vote because I didn't believe anything because I didn't really know anything. So I didn't vote.
However, you go to a school like Whitman and you can't help but suck up a lot of ideology. And that's good. That's what college is for. You're supposed to learn about the injustices in the world, about the way things should be in a perfect world, and about how far in actuality we are from such a perfect world. It's good to feel, to sense what's wrong out there in the great wide open and put on a drive to fix it. If you don't leave school with a little bit of a bloody heart then, well I won't say you're doing something wrong, but I will say that it's good to soak up some sense of social justice like a giddy human sponge and hold onto it like the sort of sparkling water you one day hope to see the world reflected in.
I wouldn't say I ever really became a massively politically minded sorta dude, but yeah, by the time I graduated I had a better sense of what's right and what's wrong in the world. What we're doing well and what we need to rearrange. Of course everybody thinks George Bush is a dummy (speaking here not for the whole country, just the vast majority of Whitman's admittedly small, admittedly liberal population), and so of course I'm going to vote democrat, because we need a Change, and Obama's gonna give it to us. However, as my first paragraph-paraphrase of my first take on the Obama campaign suggests, maybe my appreciation for the actual meaning behind that capitalized word wasn't really that great. Maybe I was more of a body surfer bowled over and helplessly swept away by the wave of Obama-mania surging through that little liberal community than, to persist in a tacky metaphor, someone who had ever stopped to think about what sort of kinetic energy that kind of a wave actually possessed. What it could actually do.
Now? I guess I'm not that much better than I was. I didn't even know Joe Biden was the democratic VP nominee until a week or so after it was announced. I'm in Japan, a little separated from the epicenter of US political activity, and I'll admit, that old political apathy was starting to seep out from deep within my bones again. Yeah, I'll register for an absentee ballot eventually. Whatever. But, today I watched the speech Obama gave at the DNC, and I had to reevaluate a lot of stuff. I always figured I'd vote for Obama, but unfortunately my sentiments listed heavily in the "just because" direction (dereliction). Well, he's a democrat. Doi. But I watched that speech today, and I now know I'm going to vote for Obama because look at what he could possibly do.
Look at where America is now. The rest of the world hates us, but much worse it's almost become expected that we hate ourselves. I'm speaking largely from a liberal viewpoint, but the past few decades, and particularly the past eight years, have introduced an infusion of national shame into our collective bloodstream, and we can't hold our heads up in public unless we do it with a sheepish look on our faces. Whoops, yeah, I'm American, yeah we suck, sorry. This is especially true for those of us in foreign countries, but I'll get to that. The National Anthem has picked up more than a minors and discordant resonances, and it gets harder to look at people waving the American flag without wanting to cringe, to look at it without feeling that the red parts are died in blood, the blue part mostly melancholy, and the stars either ironic or just more rows of soldiers waiting to fall into and get lost in the blood. I see that flag and the last thing I want to do is smile, the last thing I want to do is salute it. Because how can I, when America is rapidly becoming synonymous with a host of words far less savory than liberty and independence for all. Even "freedom" has been hijacked as a word we can believe in, has been slowly beaten and broken down, reprogrammed so that now it's just a shade of what it used to be, just a shade we hide behind when we go out into the world and do something for our own sake. The national lexicon is changing, has changed, and, though I hardly need to say it, America is far from the global angel it once was (a title which is itself intrinsically flawed, but gets to the point that people used to like us more than they do now). At this point, it feels like we've fallen out of the international sky and crashed straight into hell, only it's happened so slowly that only now are we noticing the horns poking out of our collective forehead.
That's where America is now. Living in a foreign country makes it worse. Sure, I'm in Japan, and if there is one country that would stand next to the US if it managed to shit toxic waste from the Florida coastline it's this one, but I spend a lot of time around people from the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (our... allies?) and hating on America is something of a pastime around here. We played this silly game called Typhoon the other day, where you get points for various things and if you pick a particular card you can wipe out a certain team's points. We played it where different teams were countries. At one point the US had zero points, Canada had 1,500,000, the UK got the obliterator card, and I'll give you one guess whose points they whiped out. "Uh, we'll whipe out the US's points." "Don't you dare, we'll bomb your asses." "Sorry, we're taking your zero points anyway" "Oh it's on now. Japan was the last country to bomb us and you see where that got them" And so on. It was all banter, all done with irony in mind, but it proves the point anyway that the rest of the world bashes on America, and America has no choice but to bash on itself in the face of it.
But is that how America has to be? Do we have to be a country of fat, rich, trigger-happy assholes that nobody likes? Do we have to do all the shitty things to ourselves that we do? I think for the past few years I've resigned myself to the fact that America sucks, and all I can do about it is be aware of and apologetic for that fact. But. Can we actually change what we've become? Is that what this whole Change thing is really about? Taking America in our hands like potters clay and remaking it in the beautiful image of what it could be, of what we want it to be? It's hard to think of an America I can actually be proud to belong to, because for as long as I've had a consciousness of national identity we've been shitty. We've been a bully. We've been sloppy and sordid and untrustworthy and that was that, all there ever was, all there ever will be. But just maybe we have a chance to take on decades of dishonesty and slough them off like old skin, and maybe underneath there is still a place that sparkles. Maybe we can never get our wings back, but, well, then again maybe we can. When I think about it, aiming any lower than that is to underestimate the message of Change.
Hope some of that was readable.
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