Last night, I watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, streamed over the Internet to my room in Toronto by Al-Jazeera. I was thinking of my younger sister, who lay in a delivery room in America at that moment.

She gave birth to her first baby girl at 9:51 p.m. last night, nine minutes before Obama took the podium at Mile High Stadium. I was thinking about how this man will have a disturbing amount of influence on my newborn niece’s life. That 8-pound-6-ounce baby girl doesn’t have the power to mitigate carbon emissions, find alternative sources of fuel, or repair a broken financial system. Opening her eyes for the first time, she has no idea what she’s being born into. She’s relying on Obama and his promise of genuine leadership to create a situation in which she can live a decent life. It’s the current policymakers, more so than her hardworking parents, that are going to decide how bad climate change gets and where our energy comes from and which wars, if any, we are embroiled in. Of course, the US is ostensibly a democracy, so it is impossible and unfair to put the burden on Obama’s leadership alone: it requires all US citizens to support him, influence him, challenge him, and go beyond him.

Immediately after Obama’s speech, Marwan Bishara, Al-Jazeera’s senior political analyst came on the feed I was watching. (This was followed by a great panel interview with an accountant, an elderly woman, and a cowboy in Golden, CO.) Anyway, Bishara’s first point was that although Obama didn’t mention foreign policy until two-thirds of the way through the speech, and although the speech didn’t address the injustices America was doing in other parts of the world, this was an incredibly progressive speech “by US standards.” This is critical to understand. There are people around the world hoping that Obama will say and do more, in several areas. Certainly, there’s plenty more that Obama needs to do. But as someone who has traveled through forty-eight of those states, I can say without a doubt that this is the kind of speech Obama was required to make. He can’t afford to go any farther, at this point. Most Americans are only ready for baby steps towards a more progressive nation. The best we can do for this election is hope that if and when Obama gets elected, he pulls some progressive policies out of his hat.

The central theme lacing Obama’s speech was the “promise of America”: that is, that a person in America can make a life of their choosing. I grew up in the suburbs of Washington D.C., surrounded by this rhetoric, often wondering if it was true, liking to believe it was: that I could be whatever I wanted in the world, if I just worked hard enough. It’s a nice line; an empowering one. But it only takes a look at the incarceration statistics surrounding black males aged 20-29 to indicate that it’s a misleading promise (some twenty percent of black U.S. males in their twenties are either in jail, on probation, or on parole, as reported in the book Making it on Broken Promises). These guys had the deck stacked against them when they emerged into the world. Does Johana, my just-born niece, have the deck stacked against her? She was born into a working-class family: her mom, my sister, goes between waitressing and receptionist work; her dad works in home heating repair. And, Johana is half-Korean. But this is America; she has a chance to be whatever she wants, right? She can live peacefully and be respected while part of a mixed-race family, right?

I hope so. I’ve made a point of avoiding the U.S. since Bush was re-elected, spending most of the past few years in Europe and Canada, trying (somewhat cowardly, some might say) to avoid having to experience the whole pain of the mess America has created for itself. But right now, watching the congregation in Denver wave their signs calling for CHANGE, and thinking of Johana emerging from the darkness into the bright hospital room, I want to believe more than ever that there is a grain of truth in the tired American promise. It’s such a great idea, that people have the opportunity to “to make of our own lives what we will.” It’s the best idea I’ve ever heard. Realistically, I don’t think it’s ever been true. But perhaps we can try to make it more true than it currently is. At least, we could lay down our cynicism for awhile and try to make good on this promise.

What other choice is there?

Tags: Democratic National Convention, Obama, US election

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Posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 4:17 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.