barack like me

People, I have to admit that for me this election feels personal. There are ways in which I cannot help but identify with Barack Obama - we are about the same age, both racial hybrids born of white Kansan mothers during a time when miscegenation was still illegal in many states. I know what it's like to have been one of a few students of color attending predominantly white schools, to be thought of as "not black enough," and to be perceived as either "elitist" or "special" because I speak the king's english and read and write well .... I too have attended work meetings with "domestic terrorists;" I too waited until my thirties to fully engage with a faith tradition. So when I see Obama out there seriously walking the walk, it's a little like seeing a version of myself .... Or what I might be if I were less timid, less slothful, less complacent, more diligent, more outgoing, more steadfast, more.... well, just mo' better.

And maybe you're having similar feelings, though the specifics may differ. As Mascha said so straightforwardly in one recent Integral Pod discussion: "he makes me want to be a better person." Think about that! How wild and how rare this is in postmodern USA - that a politician could inspire us to tease out our own greatness, whatever that may be.

Moreover, after eight years of deathly lies, incoherences, and grand incompetence from the Bush administration, the possibility that we may find ourselves with a genuinely diplomatic servant-leader who displays great intelligence, community-mindedness, and grace under pressure smells like manna from heaven. And okay
-- now that I've wandered into religious metaphorland I feel like I've got to qualify myself: I know he's not the messiah, already. Even he knows that - as Barack mentioned at that recent annual Al Smith dinner - he wasn't born in a manger in Bethlehem .... (his parents actually hark from the planet Crypton ...)

It's intriguing, though, how often I keep hearing such disclaimers about Obama: he's not the messiah, he's not perfect .... unflappable and smart and cool, yes, but really, he's flawed, he's got faults too .... I've heard such statements so often that now I think it's a case of protesting too much: in some ways we really do believe he's some kind of messiah or uberman, someone who will save us from this dangerous mess we're in. Thus we have to constantly remind ourselves to eschew these deifying tendencies - beyond the obvious dangers of expecting or unconsciously demanding perfection from anyone - especially a world leader -- there's the possibility that electing him will only reinforce our national tendency toward complacency, inaction, and procrastination when it comes to waking up and smelling the coffee. Well, woohoo: we got him elected! We done DONE our job. Now we can go back to sleep while the Obama administration fixes the world....

The problem with idealizing anyone is that it lets us off the hook. If the idealized person can do great things because they are special, set apart, abundantly gifted, then we normal folk can just sit back and let him/her do all the great things because, after all, they've really got what it takes and we have enough challenges just making it through each day with our ordinary old selves. I think our messiah-nizing of greatly admired people is in some ways a protective measure - it absolves us of responsibility for our world and our lives and our choices.

But might an election of Obama do .... just the opposite?

Though I've been feeling somewhat like a tired, poor, huddled mass lately, this is the question that's been lingering in me for the latter part of this year - something that I've not wanted to voice for fear of falling prey to my own naivete and idealism. But I'm enjoying the feeling that emerges when I ask this question: might an Obama presidency energize us, shake us from our sleep, and help get us up off our individual and collective asses?

If we can recognize the golden shadows that we've been projecting onto Obama and reclaim them as our own potentials, could "change" become more than the latest laudable political cliché?

I remember a grad-school moment in the 1980s, during the 25^th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Several rallies and memorials and teach-ins were organized for the event. Some far-right op-ed writer - don't recall who - pointed out that King really wasn't so great a man after all because, beyond the fact that he allegedly plagiarized snippets of sermons from other ministers, he had had extramarital affairs. This writer seemed to think that King's flaws undermined the foundations of the civil rights movement - and went so far as to suggest that the movement's goals were ill-advised since they were rooted in the dreams of such a hypocritical "sinner!" But the wider truth, as a wonderful professor of mine pointed out in class that day, is that MLK's personal faults are really a gift to us. If our martyrs and "messiahs" are actually flawed, souls with feet of clay, ordinary and broken people who have chosen to exercise their particular gifts, then it behooves us to get off our ordinary, flawed, stumbling butts, to stop putting off what we are to do, stay the course, share our gifts, to, as the previously posted song goes, finish what we started ....

And ponder this: messiahs offer salvation. Salvation is the noun form of to salve, i.e., to heal, to remedy, to reconnect what has been broken. It is also related to the word "salvage" - to rescue something from wreckage or ruin. If Obama's work and presence really makes us want to be better people, if we are able to look at what we project onto him and reclaim our own trashed or unrecognized potential - who knows what salvagings, what treasures are to come? No, Obama is not "the messiah." But with him we might discover that we are the messiahs we have been waiting for.