Comedown After the Euphoria: Rethinking Barak Obama

The longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your interactions.  You may fight it, with the town hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the old neighbourhood.  But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most of the people you represent.

And perhaps as the next race approaches, a voice within tells you that you don’t want to have to go through all the misery of raising all that money in small increments all over again.  You realize that you no longer have the cachet you did as the upstart, the fresh face; you haven’t changed Washington, and you’ve made a lot of people unhappy with difficult votes.  The path of least resistance—of fund-raisers organised by the special interests, the corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops—starts to look awfully tempting.

This admission is audacious.  We recognise it as a truth, but it can just as forcefully be used as an attack on the speaker.  We could cite it and use it to humiliate him, to say that he has buckled before he has even stepped into the White House.  And assuming that he isn’t Jesus, this book will stand as a testament of failure to whatever the outcome is of his presidency.  The story will be complex, the characters finite, and time will roll on with indifference.

Many would have heard of the stories of the Christmas Truce in the trenches during the Great War.  German troops had decorated their trenches and sang Silent Night.  Hearing this, Scottish troops responded by singing their own carols over the trenches.  The exchanges built up and at some point, one of them decided to take that step into no-man’s-land.  The rules of the game had been to shoot, but something happened on that day, when their uniforms became coats to keep warm under, and soldiers became men – cold, and tired of fighting.  That first step is the audacity of hope.  It is the heroism of a man, not a soldier.  It is the courage to do what’s right without assurance of victory, leaving your survival in the hands of others.

I think the election of Barak Obama is a lot like that Christmas in 1914.  Something happened that day, but we know we have to go back to war, and we don’t know how not to do it, we don’t know how to make Christmas last.  But something happened, and we remember that day and we know in our hearts that for a while at least we can change even a battleground into home.