Obama

I just finished reading Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. It strikes me as remarkable in a lot of ways.

First, I find some things in common with a man that is incredibly different. An African father, raised for awhile in Indonesia, a family tree that I can't follow, experiences as a youth and young man that are so far outside my experience that I thought I was reading a novel at times. And yet, I find quotes that resonate and feel so familiar.

"Why don't you come by on Sunday?"

And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and folly, between faith and simple endurance; that while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.

How much that sounds like my own youthful reaction to sincere invitations to church or Sunday School or belief.... And perhaps in ways that I am reluctant to acknowledge it still sounds like me today at times.

And when he went on safari with his sister to the great rift valley in Kenya...

Dawn. To the east, the sky lightens above a black grove of trees, deep blue, then orange, then creamy yellow. The clouds lose their purple tint slowly, then dissipate, leaving behind a single star. As we pull out of camp, we see a caravan of giraffe, their long necks at a common slant, seemingly black before the rising red sun, strange markings against an ancient sky.

It was like that for the rest of the day, as if I were seeing as a child once again, the world a pop-up book, a fable, a painting by Rousseau. A pride of lions, yawning in the broken grass. Buffalo in the marshes, their horns like cheap wigs, tick birds scavenging off their mudcaked backs. Hippos in the shallow riverbeds, pink eyes and nostrils like marbles bobbing on the water's surface. Elephants fanning their vegetable ears.

And most of all the stillness, a silence to match the elements. At twilight, not far from our camp, we came upon a tribe of hyenas feeding on the carcass of a wildebeest. In the dying orange light they looked like demon dogs, their eyes like clumps of black coal, their chins dripping with blood. Beside them, a row of vultures waited with stern, patient gazes, hopping away like hunchbacks whenever one of the hyenas got too close. It was a savage scene, and we stayed there for a long time, watching life feed on itself, the silence interrupted only by the crack of bone or the rush of wind, or the hard thump of a vulture's wings as it strained to lift itself into the current, until it finally found the higher air and those long and graceful wings became motionless and still like the rest. And I thought to myself: This is what Creation looked like. The same stillness, the same crunching of bone. There in the dusk, over that hill, I imagined the first man stepping forward, naked and rough-skinned, grasping a chunk of flint in his clumsy hand, no words yet for the fear, the anticipation, the awe he feels at the sky, the glimmering knowledge of his own death. If only we could remember that first common step, that first common word - that time before Babel."

I've never been to the rift valley or Kenya, but still my thought of early man and my thoughts during encounters with the natural world stir my mind in similar ways.

A second thing that strikes me as remarkable is that this man can write. He can think and he can read. He is an intelligent man. I believe that many of our national public leaders are intelligent men and women. However, it seems to me that it does not always work out to their advantage to appear to be too intelligent. For if their intelligence shows up in ways labeled as academic or aesthetic, they will be saddled with terms like elitist.

And yet, here is this guy that wrote a book that stitches together complex ideas around colonialism, multi-culturalism, the plight of blacks in America, encounters with spirituality and faith, and more. This isn't a book about apple pie and flags. And it isn't a simple story of I was young and made mistakes, but then I followed the advice of my mother or father and worked hard and joined the church and now I'm ready to be your leader. This book is way more complicated.

And a third remarkable thing, it looks like America is going to make this man the next President. Our presidents have been diverse in some ways. We've had crooks for presidents and we've had fools and we've had incredible statesmen and we've had principled leaders - and perhaps there is some bit of all these qualities in most of our presidents.

But we've never had anything remotely like this man. A man who identifies himself as black. A man that is one generation removed from Africa. A man who's name sounds like that of a hated enemy of our country. A man that admits to having experimented with drugs in his youth. A man born into the lower middle class of America. A man who won scholarships to the finest schools in the country and then turned around and used his passion and knowledge to work in one of the most economically and socially challenged communities in the country.

This man is new ground. And maybe at the last moment our country will decide they can't handle this much change. Maybe this is just too far and too fast.

But maybe not. Maybe we are ready to take a step beyond the racial and cultural stereotypes of our history. Maybe we are ready to take a step beyond the name calling and profiling that have been with us for so long. Maybe we are prepared to take a chance - a chance to believe what Barack Obama says.

He mentions in the new forward to this book that the world changed on 9/11. But while the world changed it also continued with the same struggles that have beset for us for years. It seems to me that Barack Obama proposes that more than policy and more than values and more than a litany of simple solution, our future is to be found in community and the discussion that informs and helps animate our community.

Just maybe we can trust that a man that understands our collective needs and struggles and helps us connect across our differences this well can also lead us in that discussion and help us redefine our community.

What I do know is that history returned that day (9/11) with a vengeance; that, in fact, as Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead and buried - it isn't even past. This collective history, this past, directly touches my own. Not merely because the bombs of Al Qaeda have marked, with an eerie precision, some of the landscapes of my life - the buildings and roads and faces of Nairobi, Bali, Manhattan; not merely because, as a consequence of 9/11, my name is an irresistible target of mocking websites from overzealous Republican operatives. But also because the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us - is the struggle set forth, on a miniature scale, in this book.

I know, I have seen , the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder - alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware - is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of the lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.

And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged, one that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come.