"Are we a nation ready to cede our power completely, with neither check nor balance, to misleading zealots?"
Does anyone still remember what it was like, in the weeks and months after (9/11)? We were going to come together -- not just in this country, but worldwide. In fact, we were together, briefly, united in our grief and shock. We stepped back and questioned our lives. In that stepping back, we asked ourselves, bombers and poets alike, What matters? Does what I am doing matter? Time spent with loved ones was -- for a while -- everything.
Then came the second war -- the flesh-and-bone, bombs-falling-from-the-sky war, the adventure in Baghdad. But beyond the crowing, beyond the bring-it-onism, other quiet and not-so-quiet terrors proceeded. A seniors' drug prescription "rescue" tucked into a trillion-dollar deficit, which makes life harder for seniors but more lucrative for large drug companies and their stockholders. A Clear Skies Initiative, which increases (invisibly, it's true) mercury pollution. A Healthy Forests initiative that threatens the only remaining truly healthy forests in the last roadless areas. The privatization of public treasures and legacies; the poisoning of water supplies; the gutting of Superfund clean-up responsibilities; the oppression and disenfranchisement of gays and other minorities; the centralization and near takeover of the media; the boarding-up of public schools, as if in some silent but not-so-secret Great Depression; the shameful charade involving the chief executive's glib and callous search under the Oval Office desk for weapons of mass destruction -- with 13,000 people dead as a result.
Nearly everyone I know, it seems, is angry at our ghost of a government -- at a federal government that we have allowed to go AWOL, leaving only a handful of corporations to run the show. This is the biggest government, the most power-mad, heartless-son-of-a-bitch machine-of-a-government this country has ever known, yet the safeguards of government are nowhere in evidence.
Part of me wants to dig in and fight harder, and part of me wants to lie down in the tall grass and love this fleeting world -- or rather, our privileged presence in it -- more deeply. As if on a ship lost at sea in a storm, I know where true north is and continue tacking for it, trying to keep the senses awake and not deny the horror of the precipice at whose crumbling edge we stand. And I find myself wishing and wanting to work like hell for a leader who possesses not bravado but courage.
Bravery is how you might respond when under relentless or horrific attack: When you hold your ground and fight back. Courage, I think, is different, and harder to attain: To fight when you might not have to; when no one would know the difference.
In these last several weeks, this last stretch, we will all be called upon to serve, and to focus our fear and anger not with traditional bravery and resolution, but with the deeper thing: Courage, that response of the heart.
It's been a hard four years. Some folks are tired. We could, for instance, choose rest rather than one final redoubling. We could, in the increasing din, choose to step quietly aside and let others voice our fear and anger for us. Or we could step up and join the chorus for change, leaping into the battle for democracy with such force that all of our previous labors will seem like those of hobbyists or dilettantes.
If ever there was a nation at a juncture it is ours. We have lost our standing and respect in the world, earned by over two hundred years of blood and guts and, yes, diplomacy. It is only with humility and pride -- the latter not to be confused with arrogance -- that we can regain that standing and respect, that position of leadership in the world, as well as on our own soil.
Whichever side of this most dangerously divided of nations, these dangerously dis-united states, the election falls upon, what I hope to capture here, on the eve of this terrifying moment, is how terribly frightened we are. We stand either to regain some of the foundations of our democracy or to cede the future, as if by sleeping proxy, to a tiny cluster of bombardiers, oil barons, and polluters. For four years we have been watching as much of that which we hold sacred is dismantled as if by barbarians: Our educational system, the dignity of decent and affordable healthcare, our clean air and water, our wilderness -- as American an icon as anything -- and the financial security of our children's generation. And, in some ways most painful of all, our respect among the nations.
The election of 2004 will come down not to federal deficit fears or intelligence betrayals, nor even likeability. I think it will -- and should -- come down to the condition and capacity of the human heart -- and to courage: The courage to demand something better, the courage to rekindle the senses -- our sense of home, sense of place, sense of duty -- the courage to awaken.
This nation's future is not about capturing or not-capturing any one mad-dog terrorist. It's not even entirely about any one Texan in the White House. Instead, it's about what is really in our hearts. Are we a nation ready to cede our power completely, with neither check nor balance, to misleading zealots?
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