‘Not This Time’
March 18th, 2008
By PETE ABEL, Managing Editor
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I watched most of Obama’s speech live on CNN.com. Of all the words he spoke, those three — “not this time” — seemed the defining words of the moment; not just of the speech, but of his entire campaign.
Better than most, those words capture, I think, why so many people from so many corners of the country — from different races, income levels, genders, and ideologies — have rallied to his candidacy: because they believe their vote for him is a vote against the past and for a different approach, a different future. Will we be divided along artificial lines of race and income and party? Not this time. Will we succumb to smear campaigns? Not this time. Will we stumble through the world blind to the fears and hopes of others? Not this time.
Or, as the Senator put it:
… we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.
This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.
This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.
And so on.
By nature, I’m not prone to embrace the “bleeding-heart” language lacing the excerpted portion of Obama’s speech. But I do agree with the underlying sentiment: that for too long and far too often we have conducted our national discourse in terms of division, in terms of “us vs. them” — whomever the “us” and “them” might be.
I further agree the time is ripe to toss aside said divisions and embrace a more inclusive meme. “Just words?” Perhaps. But words are still the currency of discourse, and discourse is still the starting point for action. And if the words of our discourse continue to focus on what divides rather than what unites us, I fear our national spirit and character will continue to flop and flounder and fail.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 9:20 am and is filed under Newsweek Blogitics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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