Montage Barrage

The doctor with the thoughtful views who disagreed with Obama yet wrote to him (195-196). I wonder what that doctor is thinking now. And I wonder what Obama thinks now: does he still presume good faith, after all the criticism (a fair amount of it deserved) that he has received from all quarters?

While a bit streamlined, I thought Obama’s explanation of where the evangelical movement came from, and where they were during the 50s and 60s, works as well as most others. It’s a pattern, however, that has from the very first European landing, bubbled under the American fabric.

As I was reading about the characteristics of Obama’s maternal grandparents—she rational and stubborn and skeptical of anything she couldn’t see, feel, touch or count, he the restless dreamer, rebellious, unable to discipline enough his appetites, yet with broad tolerance of other people’s weaknesses, including his own—I thought, gee, maybe I’m a combination of those two! :)

I was a little oversensitive to his mother’s remembrances of “respectable church ladies who were always so quick to shun those unable to meet their standards of propriety, even as they desperately concealed their own dirty little secrets; the church fathers who uttered racial epithets and chiseled their workers out of any nickel they could. For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty, and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.” (Obama 203). I was oversensitive because I know all too well a place with too many people with too many of those properties.

I was intrigued by his mother’s broad religious knowledge of many different world faiths. And by her desire that would become his: to build community, and make justice and compassion real.

I was also intrigued that Obama puts it so plainly (204) that his parents divorced when he was 2; that although his father was raised a Muslim, by that time his father had become an atheist who thought religion in general was like the mumbo-jumbo superstition of the witch-doctors of his Kenyan youth. And Barack’s step-father’s tepid practice of his Muslim faith. And Barack going to first Catholic school and then Muslim school over a period of 5 years. I was intrigued because there it is so plain, and yet Obama, both with and through his father and without, has been drawn heavily by the media and critics with the Muslim brush. Leaving completely aside the separate issue of whether being a Muslim in any way tarnishes or that it shades one’s views as an American, it is fascinating that the real picture is there and there’s not much to it. While Obama can take some criticism for later silently listening to the tirades of angry and perhaps irrational pulpit masters (who, regardless of whether they had justification for some of their feelings, clearly went into excess), his critics seem to want to paint a “tainted” picture that isn’t there, regardless of whether it would be “tainted” even if it was.

The joblessness, drugs, escapism, apathy, hopelessness, and desperation that characterized too many of our inner cities and abandoned rural sites, and which got ignored by the mainstream, has now become mainstream itself in far too many cases. I don’t know if that’s karma, but it is an example of how we are, in Martin Luther King’s words, connected even when we don’t know it, and that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Take Faith, a whole chapter of Obama’s. Secularists are off-base, Obama relates, with debilitating consequences, in seeking to remove all religion, faith, and faith “values,” from both education and public life. In a nation where parents are often exhausted, overburdened, put upon, and disconnected from a social and supporting structure, this has meant a reinforced ethical vacuum, and America reaps the bitter harvest of what it has sewn thereby. Yet secularism’s opposite number, evangelical fundamentalism, has also done us no favors. Roe vs. Wade could well have been overturned a long time ago, and power to regulate or not regulate abortion returned to the individual states and communities, if pluralistic democracy had been respected. Merely invoking the precepts of a church or church as CERTAIN universality, or being yet another one of the many religious groups to claim they KNOW God’s will, has not helped matters. To persecute, and even kill, IN THE NAME OF GOD, has emplaced much of the same Crusader zeal as the Middle Ages—and with the same effect on those who do not believe the exact same things: resentment, revulsion, intransigence, fear, and a profound lack of respect or willingness to listen to persuasion.

“It would be helpful, for example, if in debates about matters touching on religion—as in all of democratic discourse—we could resist the temptation to impute bad faith to those who disagree with us. In judging the persuasiveness of various moral claims, we should be on the lookout for inconsistency in how such claims are applied: As a general rule, I am more prone to listen to those who are as outraged by the indecency of homelessness as they are by the indecency of videos.” (Obama 221). He wonders if we should perhaps leave more things to individual conscience and evolving norms. And he goes on to subtly dig at those who rail about “the coercive arm of the state” but see nothing amiss in demanding that coercive arm enforce THEIR beliefs.

He tries to take a little heat out of the issue by pointing out that many anti-abortion folks make exceptions for rape and incest, and many pro-choice advocates make exceptions about late-term abortions. While this might point out the inconsistency of each “side’s” arguments, he recognizes that it won’t go far in closing the differences. The cynic might portray all this as merely setting the stage for a political run, and it might have been, but the questions raised are valid ones it appears to this writer. I have often said that the two viewpoints should be able to present their cases to each mother contemplating an abortion (and I think the anti-abortion side should go last if they want, as they are like the defense in a court case). On great issues of wrenching personal choice and ambiguity in the eye of at least a large minority, that seems more in keeping with the American way of how to address.

I found Obama’s personal experience of being initially opposed to same-sex marriage, and then having it made personal to him rather than abstract or general idea, to be revealing. He said the personal story made him come to feel that “hate the sin but love the sinner” still carries an inherent judgment, and that plank-eye condemning can be arrogant and unloving. Like Ben Franklin, he chose to “doubt a little of his infallibility,” and also allow more emphasis on the love and tolerance of the Sermon of the Mount than on passages from Paul to the Romans.

As a parent, I related to his feelings about his own children and the stories of violence against children. Watching my own father die, I understood Obama’s words about what his mother went through and the questions and uncertainties. Once again, the cynic might feel it is all carefully framed, but I don’t think so. What he said resonated with authenticity, because I had been where he was.

How giddy the largely black audience was for former President Clinton at Rosa Parks’ funeral seems to me another reason he is despised so much by many white male southern politicians.

The indifference toward inner city black communities, exemplified by New Orleans but not focused on it: Obama names an elephant that won’t go away. And then comes page 230.

Surreal. First there is a cadre of the Bush Administration, who trumpet big pledges and promises, show no admitting of fault or remorse, and then proceed to hand out many hundreds of millions of dollars to contractors who rape the taxpayer blind, exploit the desperate, and use little to no locals in the rebuilding “effort.” All the supposed outrage and determination to do something about New Orleans and the Gulf Coast faded away, in typical fashion, with America’s short and fractured attention span. The nation showed it had a conscience, but a brief one. Yet if Obama thought there was going to be a renewed “war on poverty” because of it, he was twice deluded: first for believing that government’s “war” on anything has solved much except to enrich special interests and fritter the taxpayer’s money away, and secondly, for thinking that enough focus could be amassed to do so, and believing that there was will there do it, which there wasn’t.

But I agree with him that, as deeply flawed as it is, this multicultural society we have is like no other. And I also recognize that Obama’s feelings on page 233 are something that I, as a still majority member, cannot have felt, and it is useless to pretend that I can know what that’s like. Race is complicated, race still matters, race is still unfinished.

It is simply not possible for a non-minority to fully understand the thoughts and feelings of a minority. But Obama tries to give us a little peek on page 236, and if we are open to it, perhaps a little more understanding (and maybe even acceptance) of the not-so-obvious hurdles, some of which go deep. And he says it is the personal interactions that transform, that “can wear down, in slow, steady waves, the hatred and suspicion that isolation breeds.” (238)

The description of successful African-American communities of the past is perhaps a prescription of what many communities need today: Parents who “whupped their children’s behinds when they got out of line, and looked out for all the children on the block.” (242)

Whites tend to think of racial equality as finished business. Blacks think of it as anything but. The truer picture, as Obama points out (243) are matters the society shies away from only at its peril. The story of race needs to be read with open eyes and open heart.

And the violent desperate of the abandoned inner cities are siblings to those with nothing to lose all over the globe. An uncaring system thinks it can cut loose its problems, but finds that they rebound on them, often destructively. And the climate of fear they generate degrades the quality of life for nearly all outside their confines. A system built on deliberate or at least uncaring inequality has only itself to blame.

Obama’s words about Mac, who gives ex-cons a second chance, but is tough love with them, was inspiring. And the things Obama asks us about where we commit our resources, and yet don’t commit even a fraction to things that prevent expenditures and pay for themselves, are hard-looks at our sense of priorities, our (over)willingness to be led in certain paths and unwilling to venture in others. Fareed Zakaria’s TIME article of March 14, 2011 says much of the same thing.

Obama gets into the complicated issues on immigration and his concise portrait is one of the best brief treatments of it out there.

Okay, enough for now. But there is still MORE to come! :)