A list of the things that will change when Obama wins…
When Obama wins…
- People will have more picnics in the park.
- No one will block the subway doors or stand on the left side of the escalator ever again.
- Skynet will be destroyed at last.
I think many of the cynics and the older people who criticize Obama’s supporters for thinking he will “change!” everything don’t understand the irony and pragmatism that is inherent in Obama’s support.
We all know he’s not perfect. We know there are many things he won’t and can’t change. We know he is a politician. We may put more hope in him than is appropriate, but it is balanced by our inherent cynicism and ironicism.
We don’t believe that “war is over” or might soon be – but we need the Iraq war to be over. We know that idealism has led to many evils and even more disastrous mistakes. We can see how the naive belief in some charismatic leader can – and has – led nations into stagnation and much worse. But we also can see that the tawdry politics of the past decades has distracted people from the more serious issues we face; we have felt disengaged from power; we have watched as politicians threw pander after pander at us, and used their words as weapons to position themselves and to bludgeon one another rather than as tools to educate.
We know that we’re not perfect – but to impute some naive idealism to us is to misunderstand where we are coming from – and probably, to see within us, a reflection of the mistakes that the sixties generation made.
We know that when Obama wins we will not all have bicycles; but we also know that his victory is an essential first step to allow us to engage with power – an engagement that has seemed less and less possible over the past few decades, but that Obama somehow, in some way, has made possible again.
Obama’s victory is not enough. He will not usher in a new Camelot. But it is the essential first step to improving our nation, to engaging with power, to beginning to tackle the longer-term problems we face as a nation.