Whirl

Here my son Tom writes, very cogently, on the general state of hopelessness many of us feel about our political system in general. He closes by asking his young friends for something optimistic. On starting this entry, I’m not so sure I can reciprocate.

Nearly 16 years ago, when Tom was eight, I watched the election returns from a hotel room in Valdosta, Georgia. I was there on business, so to speak, meaning that I was there on temporary duty with the U.S. Air force. Liberals are rare enough in Georgia today. In 1992, on a US military base, in Valdosta, I felt we were part of an endangered species.

But I was jubilant! Partially because my man had won; partially because of home state pride; but mostly because I was hopeful for my county and for the military I was so proud of. Maybe now was the time for real social reform in America.

It was a short, jaded love.

A few months later I watched in dismay as president Clinton took a political cop-out and adopted the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. I felt he broke his faith with me when he did this. As a serviceman, I knew his action would be ineffective and would continue to force many of my friends and co-workers to live a double life. I also knew that as the commander and chief he had the right to just give the order—he did not need to negotiate with anyone. True, congress would likely have overridden him, but he would have held to an important principle and could have faced his constituency with integrity—having kept his campaign promise in a true and faithful manner. Instead it seemed he was already calculating for 1994 and the equation looked to be:

A win in 1994 = (straight votes > gay and lesbian votes) = take the gays for granted

After 12 years of republican rule, I was prepared for corruption, hypocrisy, and even this type of cold hard political calculation. I just didn’t expect see it coming from a democrat. Looking back, I’ve no idea why I was so naive.

It the last 16 years we’ve watched some pretty drastic changes of face, purely calculated for political gain. Instances where the candidate seems to move away from his or her personal convictions in order to push through a less effective compromise or just to pander to a segment of the electorate.

Clinton’s about faces became so common that I learned to accept them as an inherent part of both his political and personal self. Some of them I understood and others I despised, but I began to realize that I was witnessing a purely political (and apparently, a desperately horny) creature at work. Someone who would mold himself to be part of whatever political landscape he was in at the time. I believe he is a smart person who truly feels this is what we require in our system to get anything done. In the end, he did get a lot done in spite of being reviled by a good percentage of the population.

But he also re-enforced the strategic notion that winning office was a tactical goal which had to be accomplished at almost any cost. Even if it requires a near complete subjugation of the real values and empathies of the candidate or those he depends upon the most.

Thus to get through 1996, he gave up on letting Hillary lead a major social reform effort (health care) which the country desperately needed. Was the conservative lobby so powerful in the early 1990’s that it could not be beaten with pure common sense? Maybe so. It seemed that almost any message—even one as resonate and critical as universal health care for all—could be twisted and corrupted into fear with just a few sound bites and melodramatic TV spots.

The scary part to me is that we’ve created an environment where only Eagle scouts (or, apparently, idiots) can win and even then, they must repress anything resembling true passion.

Think not? Then think Howard Dean. Has a winning coach ever been fired for giving a victory yell (or squeal, as it were). Well we fired one in 2000.

That same year, John McCain lost a nomination running as himself. He spoke out against imprudent foreign and military policy. He even dared to confront the religious right. The new republican party couldn’t tolerate a thinking leader and tossed his ass out the door. Today, he runs as someone else—a person whom I doubt John himself even recognizes.

Are we, the electorate, so tainted we cannot tolerate a genuine person?

Maybe yes.

Look at Hillary’s tears from just a couple of weeks ago. To one crowd it was all a carefully planned act and to another it was a sign of weakness. And these are democrats I’m talking about. Everyone picks from a binary menu: black or white, red or blue? There is no room anymore for magenta; no room for humanity. Even the religious elements—the so called value driven voters—expect their leaders to be cold, hard, good and evil thinkers.

The transformation of Al Gore in 2000, shocked me the most. Here was a man I deeply respected, even though he had the stage presence of a wooden stick. Who cares? It was his discomfort on stage and his passion for our planet that I found endearing. It made him human, like me, like us all. Yet to win he felt a need to become someone else. He felt the need to speak to African-Americans in a sermon sing-song and worse, he became so quiet about the environment that he let Ralph Nader take my vote (no, I don’t live in Florida).

Now. Freed from this trap he has re-gained himself and inspired us again. He has allowed us to see that deep inside there is still the same idealistic soul who found his way to center stage because he believed in more than just taking it.

Tom. I think that is your element of hope.

The notion that within us all, even within our candidates, is some precious gem of humanity. For me, that level of humanity needs to outweigh his or her ambition.

Sorting it all out is nigh on impossible. Most of the messages are too packaged, too controlled, and far too contrived. To get to the core, we all need to look—not to the candidates—but into ourselves and vote with our heart.

We need to look past our jaded love and seek new ways, build new institutions, and maybe even new parties.

Your generation has a better shot at this than mine (but many of us haven’t given up). You are 90 million strong and coming fast. Start local, spend some time with the issues, live your values, and vote with your heart.

© 2007 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.

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I spent 4 years working in this environment. This was the result of a long weekend, at work, with only Visio to entertain myself: Product Development in an Excess and Surplus Insurance Carrier © 2007/2008 by Rodney Gleghorn, all rights reserved.

As a teenager, my brother Tony and I would often float the southern end of the Cossatot river in southwestern Arkansas. We’d put in at a public landing and use our little 10 horse Evinrude to carry us up the river a few miles, then we’d shut it off and float down stream. Talking occasionally, but for the most part just listening to the world around us and casting our lines into the gentle current.

My brother is gone now. These are the memories of him I treasure the most—it was here, on the river, that I knew him best.

Floating on a river imposes a different pace on your life. It can take all day to cover a distance you could drive in an hour. On a river, you have time to study the world around you. As you meander across the countryside, you start to develop an appreciation for the landscape. You begin to take on a new awareness. You are alerted to changes in current, to the color of the water, and to the diversity of the wildlife along the way.

If you drive cross country, one of the first things you notice is the utter blandness of our man made geography. Each town appears the same from the interstate, a never ending repetition of franchise signs and overpasses. But on a river, the natural landscape often supersedes the will of man. There are no billboards—few signs of any type. You have the opportunity to see the countryside as closely as possible to the way early pioneers may have seen it.

That is, in the few places we haven’t screwed it up. The river system is a guage of our environment. When Lewis and Clark floated the Ohio river in 1803; they observed places which they literally had to push their boat through herds of animals crossing the great river. In his book “River Horse“, William Least Heat-Moon made a similar observation whilst retracing their journey on the same river. Only this time he and is traveling companion were floating their way through a vast assortment of garbage: from tampon applicators to cigarette butts. 

Rivers are now our ashtrays. The next time you hear a smoker say that cigarette filters are bio-degradable, please challenge him–those things last for years. A butt, casually tossed out a car window on I-71 may someday reach the Gulf of Mexico.

Our arrogance extends far beyond garbage. Over the last two centuries, we have dammed, straightened, and levied our waterways beyond recognition. Each levee robs the land of nutrients and actually increases the severity of flooding for communities downstream.The reshaping of a river also robs it of one of its most crucial elements—the meander. This gentle zigzag across the countryside may not strike us as orderly or efficient. But it is a natural pattern that filters the water and shapes our geography.

A river that cannot twist and turn has lost its personality—It has become a canal, a ditch. Once that happens, travel on the river losses its greatest appeal—the curiosity of what’s around the bend.

I don’t think these things necessarily rose to the height of my consciousness when I was a young teenager. I was just soaking my feet and trying to catch a fish. But our experiences on that river gave me an appreciation for what we are losing.

But the story is not purely a tale of loss. Some 7 years after I left home, my father, daughter, and I revisited the Cossatot. We were motoring upstream towards the mouth of the river and as we rounded a huge bend our eyes were drawn to the top of a tall oak. There, in the highest branch, was a bald eagle—the first I’d ever seen in the wild.

I took that eagle as a sign of hope. Hope that we can restore our environment to a better state. Hope that my children and grand children can also float on a clear river, and hope they will feel the same burning question that still drives me forward today:

What wonder lies just around the bend?

© 2008 by Rodney Gleghorn, all rights reserved.