(The last in a series I did for Quorum Report in January.)
On Wednesday we turned south and headed for Georgia. When we were planning our trip we figured that if we were driving all the way to Washington, we should not come straight back if we did not have to. I wanted a different experience on the way home than I had on the way up.
In South Carolina we pulled off to refuel and I found myself facing an older man as we both pumped gas, our breath pluming out to white frost in the night air.
“It certainly is cold!” he said, engaging me after we made eye contact.
“No kidding, especially for me. We don’t get it like this in Texas very often.”
“Well what are you doing all the way up here?” he asked. He sounded genuinely interested, so I told him we’d just come from Obama’s inauguration.
“Oh, wasn’t that wonderful?” he said. “I watched that on TV. It was something.”
We were both quiet for a second, and then he spoke to me again, quietly.
“You know, I didn’t vote for him.”
“Really?” I said. I wondered if maybe he had just been humoring me.
“I’m a Republican, and I didn’t vote for him. I want him to do well, though. He’s really trying, you know? So many of us need so much help. I’m just really hoping he does well. I have high hopes for him.” This all out like a flood. And then: “I think we all are together in wanting him to succeed.”
This was so poignant, like something you’d expect to see in Obama: The TV Movie. He looked me in the eye at first and again when I shook his hand, but when he talked about his hopes he had the faraway look of troubles. After he had gone I wondered about him, and whether his troubles were shared or his alone to bear.
Was this post-partisanship we’d heard so much about a real state of being? I began to wonder if maybe people have set aside nationalism-as-party-identity because now our common problems weigh more than our ideological differences, if those differences ever weighed much at all.
I admit that my sample size was small, but I heard this again and again, from Democrat and Republican and the unaligned and the uninitiated, newly jumped into politics by a hard world and a dark future and a new-worn hope, despite it all: we want him to succeed. I heard this before and after Rush Limbaugh proclaimed to his audience of millions that he wants Obama to fail. The cruel irony for people that feel like Rush is that they have become the true version of everything they imagined Democrats and liberals to be over the last eight years.
I willingly admit and am proud of the fact that I criticized George Bush in every forum made available to me for the decisions he made that I disagreed with and thought were bad for the country. I can say with equal personal pride that not once did I hope for the man to fail. Criticizing a president’s bad decisions is a vital right and the burden of the true patriot. Hoping for a president to fail is bad and crazy, sadism writ large. It is a lazy terrorism, a passive-aggressive terrorism by wish.
***
Getting out into America taught me that I do not know my country as well as I thought I did. Each day I found myself surprised by something I had seen or heard. And I am glad for that fact, because it means that I still have plenty to learn not only about my country but also about the people that inhabit it. As surprised as I was to see waterfalls of ice springing forth from the hewn rock of Tennessee’s roadways, so too was I surprised to find that millions of freezing, inconvenienced people can be courteous and helpful and glad to see each other.
There is no such thing as a universal American truth. Each city springs up out of its own hard earth of struggle, and those places that have been well-formed stretch across time and carry history with them. Each city nurses a people within it, an ever-changing cast of characters that are both the rules and the exceptions about a particular place and time. Legends spread and sigh themselves into solid form and soon the story of a place is only overshadowed by the simple but sometimes obscure fact that it exists, that it endures.
I belong to a generation that has no voice. What’s worse is that I belong to a generation that seems to have no interest in finding one. A friend of mine told me about a conversation he had with his step-father, who was beaten by the Blue Meanies at Berkeley, about how our generation seems to care so much less about everything while our brothers and sisters are dying in far-off lands.
And Joe said “I don’t understand why no one does anything.”
And his step-father looked him in the face and said “Why don’t you, Joe?”
And Joe was embarrassed.
And I said, “Maybe now with the wheels coming off at the end of the easy ride more people will pay attention. American life shepherds you almost immediately from your first moment of clarity right into servitude. I know that sounds all San Diego Sandinista of me, but it is true. Most kids are in debt and beholden to faceless forces and balling up their fists and staring at the ground before they even have a basic idea of who they are. “
Joe said, “Most of us don’t even start from zero, we start from negative.” Then he was quiet for a moment. “Well, here we are, right?”
“Yep,” I said. “Here we are.”
I was born in 1979 and so ostensibly belong to both Generation X and Generation Y. I suppose I claim membership in Generation Y, which is often decried as a generation that has been put-upon and acts like it. It seems that every major unfortunate thing that can happen to a generation, the complete set of tragedies and character-defining moments that normally confront an age throughout all of an age’s years, have happened to us in the last eight.
As far as we know, since the year 2000 my generation has had its Pearl Harbor, its Vietnam War, and its Great Depression. They are not precisely the same, of course, but the words our fathers and grandmothers used to tell us about the worst of times will be the words we use to describe the first eight years of this century. I recognize that things could get worse, and so this is a hope rather than a truth.
My generation has thus far been defined by what has happened to us rather than what we have done. It is not overstating things to say that the world is counting on and hoping for Barack Obama to fix an incredible array of problems. More or less, we all want him to save the world. Obama is older than us, but maybe my generation’s legacy can be one of having helped out in that endeavor. Maybe it will be that we simply took up the cause in the best interest of our country, and felt like we were a part of something larger than ourselves. We could certainly do worse.
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