Essay on Politics

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Barack Obama has a heart. That is what this election is about. For once, people have been provided an alternative to the “best of the worst” scenario that seems to inevitably accompany each election cycle. Barack Obama has given the world reason to believe that if he were to be elected, the most powerful country in the world would be steered by someone who would look at a situation, say the genocide in Rwanda, and try to do the right thing.
Saying that Obama is special because he has a heart and wants to do the right thing implicitly indicts politicians the world over. Politicians as a general rule have given me little reason to believe that their intentions fall far from the planning of their next election. Records are so easy to manipulate that politicians avoid any sort of controversy, instead opting to slip along from safe vote to safe vote.
When my brother’s best friend at Cornell took an internship in a senator’s office, he spent one entire semester collecting the opinions of the senator’s constituents about a bill whose vote neared. Nearly every single constituent, this guy said, wanted the bill to be passed. But at the end of the semester, after months of data collection, the senator voted against the bill. When explaining his decision to this shocked intern he said flatly, “It was politically expedient.”
My freshman year of college, professors introduced me to big new ideas and institutions such as global debt relief and the World Trade Organization. I was upset that I had never been taught anything about this side of the world in high school. But I thanked my professors for opening this new world for me and I vowed that somehow, I would make a difference.
That difference could only come, I suggested then, often menacingly, through politics. I read thoroughly about trade agreements and the conspiracy behind the World Bank. I determined that 9/11 had been orchestrated by our government to provide an opportunity to invade Iraq. I put up flyers late at night around campus that were intended to enlighten the unenlightened campus population about the atrocities that our government was committing. At the end of one class my freshman year, my best friend and I stayed after everyone else had left to talk with the teacher about the IMF. “What can we do?” I asked exasperated.
“We can bomb the building,” my friend said, half-joking.
“That’s the kind of thing I want you to be thinking about,” my teacher said with piercing intensity.
And it had not sounded like a crazy idea. Talking late at night in our dorm room, my friend and I would talk about how the world was in need of a revolution. We figured that there were only two ways of achieving this radical transformation. Either you had to play the game entirely the right way, faking your way to the presidency before switching up your policies, or you must be a religious leader. Both figures, we agreed, would live in constant danger of assassination.
This same friend and I zealously proselytized not only those who we deemed to hold backward, Republican political views, but anyone else who displayed their irrationality by believing in a Judeo-Christian God. We were a two man wrecking crew, pursuing idiocy and challenging those who had failed to think through these rather obvious debates with the same clarity we had. Mostly, those around us were in agreement. But sometimes we met unfortunate souls who had not yet been brought to the light. The discomfort they experienced from our assaults was necessary; Fidel always taught that change is never easy.
When Hugo Chavez came to power and began appropriating the electorate’s authority, I applauded him for standing up to America’s imperialistic hegemony. Evo Morales won and together with Fidel and Lula, there was a real movement that was going on. But all the way over here in America, I felt that there was only so much I could do. It seemed like that was my life; doing as big of things as I could, but none of them actually mattering.
That sophomore year, a debate raged on campus as to whether Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative writer, should be allowed to give a lecture on campus. One teacher offered to give an informational session the day before. I attended and after reading out-of-context excerpts from different books of D’Souza’s, I felt sure that my peers and I would not only provide him adequate opposition, but make him look silly.
He began by saying, “I will give a short lecture, after which time you may ask questions and show how much smarter than me you are.” I knew this was no cakewalk. His lecture was eloquent and well-informed and funny and he demolished all questions with ease. It became immediately apparent that the teacher who prepped us and in whom I had placed so much faith, was an ideologue. And he wasn’t that smart. I lost faith in my politics teachers. And I lost faith in politics.
Soon after this I studied in India for a year and, beset by all manner of societal aggravations, came to the conclusion that only on a person to person basis can one make a lasting difference. If one were to make the change in the world that they hope to see, then those ideals that are manifested in laws and policies must be there in one’s own life. If one demands a more equitable distribution of wealth, then that person should, in their daily life, be free and charitable with their money. And if someone wants society to provide for the poor and homeless, then there is no reason why they aren’t volunteering or at least taking the time to stop and listen.
Renouncing politics, which is what, in a sense, I did, freed me of the feeling that any small progress was worthless. If I was no longer obligated to save everyone, then I could devote more time to talking on the phone with my mom, I could listen when a friend needed support instead of feeling like, somehow, I was wasting my time. And what I found, ironically, is that this is where true power lies. In holding a door for the woman bustling in from the howling wind or letting someone step ahead of you in line, or asking the man with knit brows how his day is going, a real difference is made.
And what I have recently come to is that this difference is actually meaningful, and balloons out from the original act. With every successful potluck dinner, all of the people who attended learn, if just a little, what it means to be in community. They are then able to create this in their own life. Whenever someone shares their dark place to a compassionate, engaged listener, the speaker is then better able to be such a listener their self.
Community and acceptance, love and generosity, that is what, to me, politics is supposed to be about. Like a conversation in which two people with different points of view talk to find the answer together rather than prove their own position, politics should be about finding the best way to live and work and grow together.
Politics could be the vehicle through which our larger communities realize our shared values on a broader level. Through politics we ought to create better, more equitable lives for everyone. Yet in politics people get lost, caught up in slightly different word definitions and wind up closed towards the supposed opposition. This is why, for me, politics can only be the result of change, not the impetus.
The impetus for change, I believe, comes from one’s own communities. Waiting for the revolution to come or wishing away the world’s problems is useless. I think of holy ponds that I saw in India. These ponds would be full of bathers and pilgrims, but also, Frito Lays wrappers and Coke cans. When I asked why no one cleaned up this supposedly sacred place, I was told by my group leader, “You don’t know India, Nate. Here, people don’t just do things by themselves. They wait for the government or the caste leadership to make it happen.”
“But it would only take one afternoon if they got like ten people together,” I said with eyes squinting from confusion.
“You can’t just do something on your own like that here.”
Whereas in India communities are tight and strong, in America there is less collective cohesion, but more individual empowerment. The next evolution is for all of these empowered individuals to come together in intentional communities, starting from families, to groups of friends, to neighborhoods, to schools, to towns on up. Community organizing, this simple bringing together of people is where true power lies.
It is the power of having seen firsthand the potential energy to connect tied up in all people that I see in Obama’s eyes. And I see a journey not too different from my own. Having been a community organizer in Chicago Obama, more than anyone to hit the national scene ever before, understands that our strength lies not merely in our ability to close ranks and win an election, but in our ability to make a difference in each of our own lives, with each of our professions. And plus, we would have gotten drunk and crusaded together freshman year.

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