I want to talk about chickens coming home to roost.

I want to talk about this because it sits at the top of the list of what few in the mainstream media can acknowledge or even talk about sensibly without either being dismissed as a crank or getting ripped to pieces by the establishment flak machine.  Apparently, it also doesn’t do to dwell on non-American civilian or combatant deaths; one reason is that such figures give anti-war activists rhetorical ammunition, since massive civilian casualties seem incompatible with the idea that “we’re here to help these people.”  The uglier implication, of course, is that “these people” (or perhaps more accurately, “those people”) don’t really count, since, well, they’re not Americans.  What’s truly puzzling is that even sympathetic commentators leave this out of the equation when they discuss the war in Iraq; we hear from Frank Rich that we’ve squandered American lives and “treasure” (I’ve always found that phrasing odd—is he saying we’re actually pirates?) but nary a mention is made of the (possibly) hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died as a direct result of our invasion and occupation.  Checking down the invisible list, I find that we are also not supposed to acknowledge that the United States has helped topple more democracies than it has “liberated” in the last century; nor should we remind the public that our government has authorized attempted assassinations, illegal arms trades to tyrants such as Saddam Hussein, and the training and financing of thugs such as Osama bin Laden to fight our proxy wars, and on and on.  To dwell on such points is to be deemed “hysterical” or “unpatriotic” or “traitorous.”  It’s bad enough to be forced out of a conversation for bringing up such points; but the worst part is that it’s all a matter of public record, and yet little of it seems to penetrate the American collective consciousness.  

Now, I’m not for hate-talk.  I even try to avoid angry-talk (though, clearly, I sometimes fail on that count).  I don’t agree with damning America, and I don’t think that we collectively “deserved” the attacks on September 11, 2001.  Nobody deserves such horror. But watching people across the media spectrum fly off the handle over Reverend Wright’s sermon excerpts reminds me of how reactionary this country is in all considerations of its place in the world.  It doesn’t seem to occur to the critics that folks like Wright say ill-advised, divisive, and inflammatory things from time to time out of a legitimate anger— because people in this country don’t pay attention to their own history.  Rather, that sort of awareness seems to be crowded out of our minds by the more soothing balm of American exceptionalism.  And frankly, I can’t blame anyone for being pissed off about that.  It’s one thing to take pride in the ideal of freedom that is embodied in the founding of this nation; it’s another thing to willfully ignore how desperately short we have fallen of that ideal over and over and over again, from our inception to the present.

Our willingness to gloss over whatever is ugly in our history has been flagrantly on display ever since 9/11, and it has gotten us nowhere.  It’s a terrible mistake to ignore the rationales for our enemies' hatred, and for the sympathy that some people throughout the world have for that enmity; matters are only made worse by shruggingly claiming that they “hate us for our freedom.”  Our foreign policy constantly ignores the possibility that people elsewhere might be as proud of their countries as Americans are of our own.  It is not of trivial importance to have another nation’s military camping out in your backyard. The Saudis have been burning over our military presence for years.  So have many other peoples.  If this seems unreasonable, imagine that the Russians or the Chinese insisted that they keep a base and a military airstrip outside Washington, DC. Americans’ only rationale for the double standard seems to be, well, we’re Americans!

And we wonder why we’re not the most popular kid on the block anymore.

For all the comparisons that have been recklessly made by President Bush between the “war on terror” (no, it doesn’t deserve capital letters) and World War II, the only really valid point of logical intersection is the very one that is most vigorously shunned in public discourse.  That is to say, in neither case did the United States “bring it on herself”; but in both cases, governmental incompetence, coupled with a mixture of pseudo-imperial ambition and catastrophic diplomatic failures, made us vulnerable, and in that sense, helped to set the stage for the attacks.  What’s interesting is that in both instances, we have been willing to criticize governmental ineptitude—the isolationist Senate after Pearl Harbor, the intelligence agencies and, to a lesser extent, the administration after 9/11—while doing our best to ignore the role our own national ambition had in enabling those who would do us harm.

It’s simply not true that we have always or even consistently approached the world with the noblest, most democratically-minded intentions.  We have engaged in wars of conquest just like any other nation.  We have kept colonies by military force just like any other nation.  This doesn’t mean that we’re worse than others; that we’re the “great satan” (that doesn’t deserve capital letters either), or, most improbably, that some cabal of conspirators has made use of our might to rule the world and oppress our own people.  Rather, it means that, upon emerging onto the world’s stage as one of its preeminent powers, we have done what nearly every other state in that position has historically done—that is to say, we’ve attempted to consolidate our power and manipulate the flow of money, resources, and influence most favorably in our own direction, often to the detriment of others (which, incidentally, never works out in the long run).  It’s nothing new, of course.  It doesn’t make us particularly guilty, compared to other world powers.  But it does mean we shouldn’t hold ourselves immune to criticism, nor ignore the real cost that this global ambition has had for others, not to mention our own democratic ideals.

Funny thing. In all of our large talk about being an example to other nations or spreading democracy (whether you like it or not!), our genius system itself is not something we’ve vigorously tried to export.  We haven’t exactly proselytized about the wonders of the bicameral legislature and semi-autonomous (but subservient to federal power) states to an awed world.  That’s because, despite all of the teary-eyed rhetoric about the “genius” of the American political system that most kids in this country are subjected to from K-12, practically no one thinks it will work elsewhere.  Hell, at times, it barely seems to work here.  Even in the countries that we “liberate” or prop up by force, we get European-style parliamentary systems at best, or (sadly, more frequently) military juntas serving under brutish strongmen.

What we’re left to conclude is that our freedoms are not inherent; they did not fly like so much fairy dust from the quill pens of men like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington.  Rather, they’re the product of personal and shared courage, imagination, hope, empathy, outrage, and the ever-emerging refusal of hardworking Americans with dreams of their own to accept the pallid versions of freedom and opportunity that those in power have chosen to dole out.  I’m not just referring to the protestors and the activists, but to the community organizers and charitable members of the clergy and attorneys and social workers and volunteers and nonprofit service providers and teachers and all the public servants who have worked throughout our history with dignity and care.  I’m talking about writers and artists who have staked their careers on truth-speaking, politicians who have stood by progressive principles and striven to represent the voiceless, and parents who have labored year after year so that their children could enjoy more opportunities than they themselves have had, and every single citizen who has taken a chance and stood against tyranny, bigotry and murder at home and abroad.

The genius of this system isn’t the system at all.  It is, first, that it is allowed to change.  And it is, secondly, that this nation’s founders declared from the outset that, at the very least, this country is supposed to stand for liberty.  Many frequently angry and outraged people in this country—myself certainly included—all too often forget the potential power of that second point.

This is why Barack Obama’s speech on race was momentous, why his candidacy is extraordinary, and why I’m now throwing all my persuasive strength behind him to anyone who will listen.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I sympathize with Michelle Obama’s off-the-cuff statement about the newness of her sense of national pride.  There have been many times throughout my life—reading about our troubled history, or watching as we attempted to “shock and awe” the very people we were supposed to be liberating—when I have not exactly swelled with patriotic fervor.  I have, in fact, felt ashamed and frightened for our future.  How exciting, then, to witness the rise of a politician—a politician!— who forcefully urges us to live up to our own promise, reminds us that greatness is earned, and has the courage to exhort us on those terms, despite the cynicism and callowness of much of our political system and the media that purportedly covers it.

We should ask of ourselves: what does it take to enact a sea change?  Is it always crisis: the War for American Independence, the Civil War, the Great Depression?  Or can positive shift in values begin to take root over time, through painstaking example and personal sacrifice?  The latter, I think, is exemplified by the civil rights movement that transformed the United States in the last century, and which, Obama was right to remind us, has neither ended nor completely fulfilled its goals.  It’s ironic that so much of neoconservative ideology, with all its talk of liberty and freedom, seems founded on contempt for the twentieth century’s unrest, protest and civil disobedience; such triumphs of human progress—fought for stubbornly, ingloriously, and often at great personal cost—are, far more than our system, or any inherent greatness, the best reasons to be hopeful for our future, and proud of our past.  We live in a nation in which many, many people have overcome—overcome the horrors of human slavery, overcome lack of representation and disenfranchisement, overcome poverty and segregation and intolerable abuses.

We would do well to remember that the documents which we are taught to venerate in our history classes are nothing without that continuing, hard-fought principle of liberty.  And I, for one, cannot imagine a more auspicious possibility for the near future of our country than a president who will lead in this spirit, with the knowledge and the expectation that true change springs from the people; one who will finally, finally inspire us forward toward that more perfect union that has been the unfulfilled, but always dreamed-of, promise of the United States of America.