[I sort of said this last night after the speech, but I want to say it again after thinking about it for a while]
Most of Obama’s speech on Afghanistan was predictable. We’d heard all about it beforehand. But at the end, he got to the things that matter the most.
Since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, and the service and sacrifice of our grandparents and great-grandparents, our country has borne a special burden in global affairs. We have spilled American blood in many countries on multiple continents. We have spent our revenue to help others rebuild from rubble and develop their own economies. We have joined with others to develop an architecture of institutions – from the United Nations to NATO to the World Bank – that provide for the common security and prosperity of human beings. We have not always been thanked for these efforts, and we have at times made mistakes. But more than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades – a time that, for all its problems, has seen walls come down, and markets open, and billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress and advancing frontiers of human liberty.
A lot of my personal preoccupation with matters political in the last five or six years was stimulated by the vacuum I felt when our government veered away from the line Obama outlines here. Under the guise of becoming the world’s "sole superpower" – a unilateral force that treated the United Nations as if it were either an American pawn or superfluous – we lost sight of our vision of a world community in which we were a member. The group known as the Project for the New American Century proposed we should see the fall of the Communist Bloc not as relief from the decades of Cold War, but as a window of opportunity to assert "American Exceptionalism" as a policy to guide us. Obama reminds us of what we were before these people actually spent eight years trying to put their plan into action.
For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for – what we continue to fight for – is a better future for our children and grandchildren. And we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity…
Over these last eight years, I’ve repeatedly seen the Roman Emperors or the Feudal Kings in my mind when our leaders spoke – obsessed with power, disdainful of compassion, driven by fear and paranoia. We did seek world domination, actively. What else would a world "superpower" be doing? We did hope to occupy other nations, or at least use their land for military bases and business expansion. We stopped world communism, then set out to replace it with world americanism. And as for other nation’s resources, we assassinated a world leader and invaded his country with that exact goal in mind. Our leaders wanted us to be like the "great powers of old" – the New American Century! And, in spite of the disclaimers, people of other faith and ethnicity haven’t fared well in our hands. We certainly haven’t paid much attention to the fate of "other peoples’ children and grandchildren." Obama was kind. He reminded us of our values and our place in the world, rather than attacking his predecessors’ disavowal of the whole point of this country they were supposed to be leading. I am less kind. For the last eight years, I haven’t been able to find the America that opened its arms to my father’s starving family. I am one of those "other people’s children and grandchildren."
This vast and diverse citizenry will not always agree on every issue – nor should we. But I also know that we, as a country, cannot sustain our leadership, nor navigate the momentous challenges of our time, if we allow ourselves to be split asunder by the same rancor and cynicism and partisanship that has in recent times poisoned our national discourse.
"Poisoned" is a good choice of words. It feels like poison, the kind that slowly takes the life right out of you. I’m not even going to read the predictable barrage of sarcasm and devaluing snipes that will surely follow this speech. It’s gone on too long, and it erodes my thoughts and my daily life as if it were battery acid poured on my soul. It is poison, and that’s what it’s meant to be.
It’s easy to forget that when this war began, we were united – bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack, and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear. I refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again. I believe with every fiber of my being that we – as Americans – can still come together behind a common purpose. For our values are not simply words written into parchment – they are a creed that calls us together, and that has carried us through the darkest of storms as one nation, as one people…
President Obama cannot make this happen. He can certainly point the way and survive the poison, but he can’t make it stop. Years of practiced divisiveness has left a deep cleft in the American psyche. It will take years to repair it in the best case – and there’s always the possibility that we’ll follow the path of the "great powers of old," forgetting where our real power lies and joining them in well-earned obscurity. If there’s any meaning at all to the term, american exceptionalism, it’s not in the way former Vice President Dick Cheney used it recently. It means we’re still capable of electing someone like Barack Obama who understands how far we’ve regressed, and is trying like hell to help us remember that, like him, and like me, we are all just "other peoples’ children and grandchildren" trying to do it a better way…
Well said, Mickey.