Kent Nerburn

There are two little noticed aspects of Obama and his family that I think bode very well for America.

The first is Michelle. She has, from the outset, been adamant that family came first. She demanded it of Barack, and I think it was a sine qua non of her willingness to embark upon this shared political journey. I believe she will carry this commitment into the White House.

What this means is that we will have, for the first time in memory, a First Mother who has taken that role by choice. None can doubt her talents in other areas, and she will surely choose a social cause to champion, as all First Ladies do. But I truly believe that, shining through her involvement in whatever cause she may choose, will be her commitment to raising a healthy, well-grounded and well-rounded family without hiding them from public view.

You can already see it in the girls — they are not little smiling automatons or perfectly drilled political children. They are just kids, looking with wonder at the circumstances in which they find themselves, and sharing that wonder with us all. This is a reflection of strong and steady parenting: the children can be trusted to be themselves in a public setting without fear that the selves they show will be either ill-mannered or inappropriate. Like Barack, like Michelle, they are comfortable in their own skins. My guess is that the Obamas as a family will work their way into our cultural consciousness as an honest antidote to the juvenile abusiveness of laugh track TV families, and offer a model of civil behavior to us all.

At the heart of this, as it should be, will be the strong and powerful presence of Michelle. She will be almost a post-feminist figure, not balancing motherhood and a profession, but intertwining them in a way that shows the two of them to be complementary parts of a fully realized human being. If she can do this, she will advance the cause of feminism in a way that will be equally as significant as Barack’s contributions to advancing the cause of post-racial identity.

The second contribution is potentially equally as far reaching. With the arrival of Barack, we have the return of “cool” as a viable expression of personal identity. Between gangster aggression, television talk show screaming, and glowering athletes, we have become a culture that values “hot” in the McLuhanesque sense of the term. Especially in the African American youth culture, which serves as the vanguard for popular cultural forms and identities for almost all of American youth, the idea of a “cool” identity has fallen out of favor. In its place we have lionized a “hot” aggressiveness.

Barack appears to have the capability of changing this. All through the campaign, when attacked, he either embraced and then neutralized the attack, or calmly staked out his considered position and held to it without either aggression or rancor. He respected his opponents, laughed at his own shortcomings, and made civility a virtue. In short, he modeled a measured and worthy manhood.

If, through some bit of cosmic grace, we should have found at this moment in time a woman who can model a resolved and caring motherhood as well as professional excellence, and a man who can show that strength is in embracing rather than in posturing and confronting, we will be standing in a rare shaft of historical sunlight.

At least until shown otherwise, I choose to believe this is true. It will show an America that has come of age, not merely racially, but psychologically. The young country that has so attracted and confounded the rest of the world in its agitated struggling for an identity to match its sheer physical power, will finally be able to lead by example rather than by force.

I once wrote in Letters to My Son, “Strength based in force is a strength people fear; strength based in love is a strength people crave.” The Obamas raise the very real possibility that we will manifest a strength based in love. If this is the case, their presidency will reverberate far beyond the confines of political action and discourse. They will, in effect, redefine what it means to be an American. It is, to my mind, a redefinition that is long overdue.

Technorati : Michelle Obama, american identity, americanism, obama

I keep getting gentle prods from readers to write an occasional blog. It’s encouraging to know that there are still a few of you out there checking in periodically. As you can tell, I’ve gone cryogenic as a blogger — not completely dead, but in a state of semi-frozen literary suspension. Now and then someone pours hot water on me and I sit up and stare around. The prods from you readers are the hot water that prompts this post.

First, my own situation. It has been a difficult winter. My mother died on Christmas day. A mother’s death is different from a father’s death. At least for a man, the father is the roof over your head, the mother is the ground beneath your feet. When they are both gone, you float free into the universe. As my wife puts it, you become an orphan.

This experience is worthy of an entire book, though it’s not one I’m inclined to write. Suffice to say that her death on Christmas Day had the unexpected consequence of giving the day a new significance, even sacramentality, that I will always treasure. It also reinforced the naturalness of the experience of death and made me wonder anew why it is that the human animal in its passing cannot mirror the passing of the day — moving into a glorious sunset followed by a gentle twilight that marks the closing of the day. However, I can report with authority that it does not.

So, anyway, I am sad. It is a deep sadness, far beyond any surface emotion. It is a sadness that is almost akin to peace — a quiet resignation in the face of a truth much larger than my own. Like the birth of a child, the death of a parent makes you one with the human family, and that, in the face of the deep sadness, is a great balm.

On the practical front, I am finishing a follow-up book to Neither Wolf nor Dog. I have been working on it for years, but have not spoken of it simply because I have not wished to do so. It will be called The Wolf at Twilight, and will be coming out in the fall. I will say more about it as it comes closer. But Dan’s story has been a conundrum for me in many ways, and I prefer simply to tell it rather than talk about the telling. So those of you who are curious will simply have to wait.

People have also been asking me about my take on the apparent economic crumbling going on around us. So, here it is.

Like everyone, I am worried for the financial well being of myself and my family. And my heart goes out to all of those whose fall has been harder and deeper than my own.

I am filled with righteous anger — anger that banks will be given money without accountability so that they can continue to be economically viable while the people to whom they loan money are allowed to sink and drown; anger at the misshapen world view and confused values that the car companies have shown by using their bail out money to provide low interest loans on car and truck models that cannot sell because they should never have been made; anger at the greed and blindness of corporations and industries who think that they should have money simply because they feel that they need it, while we as individuals feel the same need, but are given only vague promises that less will be taken out of our pockets.

Looking at it analytically, however, I just shrug my shoulders. We should have seen this coming. We are simply witnessing, after thirty years, the real fruits of Ronald Reagan’s paradigm shift in American thinking — that money and favor should be given to those who create jobs — no matter how menial and degrading those jobs are, and no matter how inequitable their pay scales and internal wealth distribution may be — on the curious assumption that corporate self interest, properly funded, will miraculously translate into public benefit and social good as the wealth trickles down to the individual.

An entire generation has grown up under this mirage, either unaware of the fact that it was accomplished by cutting the throat of the union movement and shredding the social safety net, or indifferent to the fact that those things ever occurred. A short-memoried public has been sold the story of individual greed and self interest as a noble narrative of self reliance and the American independent spirit.

Now this all is coming home to roost, and, in the short term, it will not be pretty.

Meanwhile, the pendulum is swinging back toward government involvement without the requisite structures in place to make that involvement work smoothly. The fig leaf will be ripped from our current way of doing the public’s business, and the reality of government inefficiencies and our hallowed history of pork barrel distribution of government funds will become frighteningly apparent as the amounts of government monies slated for distribution becomes ever greater.

But this inevitability notwithstanding, we will be well served by a shift in our national consciousness away from the belief in empire, both personal and political. What that shift will be to depends on the vision of governmental leaders, the reconfiguration of corporate values, governmental operational models, and the revaluing of goodness, kindness, and sharing in our own personal lives.

I have spent my adult life struggling with the hard truth that as individuals we are a giving and sharing people, but as groups, whether governmental or corporate, we are venal and self-serving. I would love to see corporate and government behaviors align with the principles of caring that most of us as individuals try to practice in our lives. But to do that we need to have leaders of vision who refuse to kowtow to systems that have become rancid by hiding greed under the cover of “sound business practices”. And we need to stop those who look for cracks in those systems — both individuals and corporate/governmental entities — that see every situation as a chance to serve their own selfish purposes.

As I said, I believe this will be a hard time. But systems reconfigure themselves only after they are irremediably broken, and many of ours appear to have reached that state. The people who are alive at that time of breakage draw a difficult card. But who are we to avoid suffering not of our own devise? Many other generations have experienced it; many alive now in other parts of the world have been experiencing it for years.

But I see two good things coming out of this disintegration.

First, it will give the young people something to believe in and a chance to demand change. Since the sixties, the younger generations have been forced to simply find their place in the machine. Now the machine is broken. They can help construct a new one with the help of those of us who have always been dubious about the one we inherited. It is a chance for all of us to link hands in pursuit of something larger.

Second, it will force us to turn to each other for help. For too long we have believed that strength resides in those who win, not in those who serve, and the goal of too many people has been to become “a winner.” This is going to have to change, partly because a society that operates on the model of winners and losers becomes a heartless beast, and partly because, in some measure, all of us are going to have to lose. Those who make the shift and decide that they must dedicate themselves to serving — and not the caricature of serving that says that by creating wealth for myself I am serving those beneath me — those people will survive and thrive. The echoes of our parents’ and grandparents’ words, that they think people were happier during the Great Depression when nobody had anything, will begin to have real meaning.

I, personally, think we are putting a good man in the White House. I think he understands what needs to happen. Whether he can make it happen, or whether the systems and mindsets are so calcified that they cannot be moved, remains to be seen. There is not even any proof that anything can set things aright. Perhaps we are simply reaping the whirlwind.

But individuals survive and thrive in the most barren economic and physical environments. They create lives and friendships and societies and dreams. They only fail to survive in barren spiritual environments. And we are not yet a barren spiritual environment. We are a big-hearted people. We are filled with love and compassion and the capacity to hope. Anyone who comes here from another country sees that. But the dissonance between our personal character and our public and corporate behavior has become almost too great to comprehend.

The question now is whether the government can become a mirror of our better selves and an agent of positive change. Personally, I think it can, and, more than any time in my life, I am hopeful. I had no problem with Michelle Obama’s comment that, for the first time in a long time, she was proud of her country.

Overall, I think that this is a great time to be alive, because it is a time of great significance. For those who have come to believe that a life well lived means a fat 401K and a Lexus in the garage, it will be a bit of a shock. But beneath this urge for security and prosperity there has been lurking a feeling in those of good heart that we have been stealing from our children and putting our boot on the neck of much of the rest of the world. And we know that our strange position as magnetic north for the hopes of people everywhere has given us a unique opportunity to serve the better impulses of humankind.

For another brief moment in time, we can shape human aspirations and direct the world’s vision to higher values. This sounds grandiose, but I believe it is true. America is unique because, as a nation, we are founded on nothing more than an idea. The challenge before us is to define that idea — freedom — in a way that serves human good rather than individual greed. We’ve done it before; we can do it again.

We’d better, because a whole lot is riding on us. I, for one, would have it no other way.

Technorati : bush, economic situation, freedom, neither wolf nor dog, obama, us economy

Just a quick thought on some election language.

We all know the obscenity of this incendiary “terrorist, Muslim” talk from McCain and Palin — mostly Palin, product of one of the strangest political gambits in modern history.

But I would ask you to keep an eye to something else.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are, ostensibly, supporting and working for Obama. But if you’re like me, you have sensed something tepid and almost subversive about that support. At first I thought it was just the cool, analytical nature of each of their demeanors when they spoke of Obama’s campaign. But a closer look reveals something that is more objectifiable and easily monitored: watch how frequently each of them uses the pronoun, “he” rather than “we” when speaking of the Obama campaign.

It is a simple equation: “We” equals support; “he” equals analytical distance. It is exactly this sort of political cunning that has been the Achilles heel of the Clintons since they burst on the national scene, because, in its own way, it is more enraging than the tub-thumping racism and fear mongering of people like Palin.

As an Indian friend of mine once put it, “Be more afraid of the snakes than the bears, because you can see the bears coming.”

For my money, the Clintons are acting like snakes.

Technorati : Clinton, Obama, Palin, election

It’s three a.m. I should be in bed and I certainly shouldn’t be blogging, because one’s sense of proportion is never very trustworthy during “the hour of the wolf.” But I’m mulling over a fascinating chain of events and thinking about their significance, so I thought I’d share my thoughts with you.

Last week several websites actually attributed my cab driving story to me. For those of you who don’t know, it is a story that I use in my book, Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace, to illustrate the line in St. Francis’ famous prayer, “And where there is sadness, joy.” The entire book is a series of ruminations/meditations on Francis’ beautiful prayer that begins, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.”

I wrote the book about a decade ago as a kind of spiritual meditation. I took each line of the prayer and tried to find some exemplification of it in my own or other people’s lives. My thinking was simple: St. Francis, of all the religious figures of the past, is perhaps the most universally beloved. He is beyond sectarianism, beyond doctrine. And though he was thoroughly Christian — some would say, too Christian for the church of which he was a part — something in his deep humanity has resonated down the centuries and transcended theological differences. I felt that I could do myself some spiritual good by engaging in an extended meditation on the prayer that may be the most universally beloved on the planet.

It was, and remains, an uneasy book for me, because it is in no way Christocentric, which Francis most assuredly was. But he was also the most embracing of the Christian spiritual thinkers. I figured that if he met me, he’d probably find a way to enfold my spiritual strugglings into his faith, so why not work backwards, and use that faith to illuminate my spiritual strugglings? It proved to be a good choice: writing the book was one of the most clarifying experiences I have ever had as an author.

But, back to the cab story. In the book I tell the story of when I was driving a cab in Minneapolis and picked up a woman who was going to a hospice. We drove around all night at her request in what was very likely her last real journey through the outside world she was preparing to leave. It was one of those “blue moments,” as I call them, when some kind of spiritual light shines through the ordinary affairs of everyday life. As most of you know, this is one of the primary themes of my work as a writer.

Well, this cab driver story, in various iterations, has moved virally around the internet for years. It got changed, detached from the Francis book, and attributed to any number of anonymous and not so anonymous sources. It frustrated me, but I tried to listen to my better angels and take satisfaction in the fact that at least it was being read.

Then, last week, something happened. Several websites, primarily zenmoments.org, reddit.com, and something called, I believe, dooce.com picked it up. Within hours my website was being hit like it seldom has before. On the third day after the initial publication I had almost 49,000 hits. This has not happened since my postings on the Red Lake shootings a number of years ago.

What was interesting to me was the comments that people made in response to the story. There seemed to be two fundamental threads: “This is a beautiful story; I’m glad there are people like this in the world,” and “What a bunch of sappy, probably fictional, crap.” Well, though strange and improbable, it is not fictional. Anyone who’s ever driven a cab knows that things happen that are beyond belief.

But that’s neither here nor there.

What is important to me is that in this dichotomy of responses lies the human struggle that so many of us live on a daily basis. We want to be the good person who picks up the old woman, drives her around, and refuses payment for giving her the last ride of her life. And yet we are also the caustic, cynical, folks who pick at the world and carp about things that irritate us or upset us. As Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” Or, to put it in St. Paul’s terms, “That which I would, I do not. That which I do, I would not.” We are simply complex creatures that contain both dark and light in us in varying degrees.

What I wanted to do in the Francis book was to bring out the light. I did not want to claim that I was light, or that I always lived in the light. Those who make such claims are either saints, or deluded, or disingenuous. And there are precious few saints among us.

The constant presence, and overwhelmingly positive response to the cab driver story tells me that there is, in almost all of us, a yearning for the light. We want to be the good person, the one who does the good thing, the one who makes the proper response to the situation. Yet, sadly, and far too often, we do not. That I did so in that moment in the cab back in the mid 1980’s does not make me a good person. It makes me a person who, for one moment, did something that was good. As a dear friend of mine once said, “Most people just slog through the world trying to be kind.” That’s what I was doing on that unexceptional August morning when an exceptional moment broke through the ordinariness of an ordinary day.

If I wrote a book about all the times I failed to do the right thing, or actually did something mean spirited or jerky, it would be far longer than the book of my better moments. But you don’t need to hear about those. You have your own mean spirited and jerky moments, and the world is full of folks who celebrate those moments by indulging their cynicism and skepticism. The cab drive story was a reminder to me, that I passed on to you, that we do have our better angels, and that we should assert them when we can. That the overwhelming majority of you appreciated the story is simply proof that we all feel better on those occasions when we do let our better angels have their voice.

In this time when dominance is praised as strength, where skepticism is often more prudent than trust, where disengagement is safer than engagement, we need to be reminded that the kind gesture that makes us vulnerable and serves no practical end is often the best gesture of all. The cab ride, for me, was one of those gestures.

I am pleased that so many people have found it. I only hope that they will follow it backward to the source. Forget the word, “Lord.” Replace it with whatever term you use for your understanding of the Creator or spiritual force that animates this universe. But don’t forget the next phrase: “Make me an instrument of your peace.” That’s what the world needs now. That’s what I was trying to be on that cab ride. That’s what I’ll try to be today.

I hope you will do the same.

A website out of the U.K., zenmoments.org, has recently posted the now well-traveled story of my experience as a cab driver, when I picked up an old woman who was on her way to a hospice. It has reached number one on a number of websites as a result.

I am thrilled when my ordinary life offers up an extraordinary moment that brings some solace or insight or enjoyment to others, and such has been the good fortune of that moment in the late 1980’s when I was driving the “dog shift” in Minneapolis, Minnesota. What is noteworthy about that moment, beyond it’s poignancy, is that I did not create it; I merely experienced it and let it unfold.

Life gives us all such moments — I call them “Blue Moments” (See Letters to My Son for an explanation) — where a brilliant light shines through the ordinary moments in our ordinary days. They come unsolicited and unannounced, and provide us the gift of significance and, if we are lucky, the opportunity to serve.

What it is important is to remember that these ARE gifts, and that we cannot receive them if we are not open to them. We need to listen closely, watch closely, and take care not to rush past or through them when they arrive. They are the fabric of our lives, and they will weave themselves with complexity and beauty if we give them time to do so.

I bring this up because I’d like to make you two offers — one big and one small. The small one first: If any of you would like to read the original piece, unmodified and in the context in which it was written, I would like to offer you the opportunity to buy a signed copy of Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace: Living in the Spirit of the Prayer of St. Francis. It is one of my lesser known books, but one of my favorites. In it, I tried to write an extended meditation on each of the lines of Francis’ famous prayer and to illuminate them with stories from my life and the lives of others. The cab ride story is one of those.

The second offer — the big one — is made to all of you, but especially you readers in the U.K. I will be in the U.K. next spring. The exact dates are not yet set, but they will likely occur in April and early May. If you would like to have me come to speak to any group of yours, please contact me and we can try to make the arrangements. The same holds true for any group anywhere in America. I enjoy going out to speak because it allows me to meet my readers. It also allows me to share some of the stories and insights that my journey through life’s “blue moments” has offered.

So, thank you again for your continued interest in my work. I will keep trying to earn your trust by doing my best in everything I write. It is the least I can do to honor the faith you have shown in me.

Here’s how it’s done: bring in concrete barriers and erect them in ways that form choke points, dead ends, and traffic diversions so that vehicles can only go where you want them to go when you want them to go there. Place traffic control police at every strategic corner. Set up heavy eight-foot tall mesh screens end-to-end to wall off selected areas, and have manned metal detector entry points wherever you want to control people’s entry and exit.

Have different color passes for different degrees of access and make people wear them in plastic sheaths attached to lanyards hung around the neck so so they are readily available for examination. In areas of special concern make everyone do the airport security dance of taking out their cell phones and keys and sending them through xray machines on conveyor belts.

Once you get all this in place, let people do what they want.

So what you have here in Denver is a tightly controlled, structurally contained, party. The streets themselves are festive and full of life. The outdoor tables at restaurants overflow with convention goers; the shuttle buses that go up and down Denver’s main mall are filled with folks who are laughing and talking and open to strangers.

Actually, Denver is wonderfully designed for such an event. It has one long street that is a pedestrian mall with free shuttle buses, and a number of side streets splitting off from that mall that contain restaurants, big hotels, and other entertainment and tourist venues. You can survive very nicely on just these few streets if you have a credit card, a love of liquor, good food, and entertainment, and no desire to see the seamier or more human side of Denver life. It’s a cultural Potemkin village, and that’s just how Denver and the convention wants it.

Mostly folks are tolerant of these constraints. Everyone knows there is at least one nut out there with a high powered rifle or a bag of explosives, so you accept your containment with only a minimal amount of grumbling. You even dare joke a bit — this is not the clenched-jawed airport security world where a quip about a bomb gets you sent to Guantanamo.

In fact, the police, of whom there are hundreds, if not thousands, are affable and willing to make light of the situation. I asked at one point if I could chain my bicycle to a tree or if it would be assumed that it had been left there by Osama Bin Laden. The police just laughed and said, “You don’t look like Osama. Go ahead. Anywhere’s good.”

And tonight, mildly bent out of shape by the need to go through a metal detector to sit in an auditorium and watch a video of Hillary giving her speech, I asked if there was some likelihood that someone was going to take out a gun and shoot the screen.

At first the man doing the checking took justifiable umbrage. “It’s to make you feel safe,” he said.

“I feel safe at home,” I smiled, “And I don’t have any metal detectors to get in my front door.”

He looked around to make sure no one was listening, then said, “I grew up in Iowa where we left our doors unlocked and our keys in the car.”

“I live in northern Minnesota where lots of folks still do,” I answered. He shrugged and said, “That’s the way it ought to be, but this is the way it’s become.”

And, sad to say, he’s right. This is the way it’s become. In a country where security has become equated with the right of everyone to carry a gun to blow the head off of someone else who might be carrying a gun, the whole system falls apart when, suddenly, the rules are changed and a bottle of shampoo or a lipstick tube becomes a potential weapon. Last week I was supposed to feel safe because I was allowed to walk around carrying an Uzi, today I’m supposed to feel safe because no one is allowed to enter a building carrying a nail clipper.

Denver has done a good job of hiding this cultural schizophrenia by putting us all in a structural containment vessel. The hawkers are smiling, the thousands of police are smiling, even the protesters — with the notable exception of those walking around carrying posters of dismembered fetuses — are smiling. Just go where you’re supposed to go, do what you’re allowed to do, and everything will be fine.

It’s all one big party, but just remember not to leave the main room.

I am at the Democratic Convention in Denver, and it hasn’t been easy. No city can prepare for a one-time event like a convention and hope to do it right. The volunteers in their orange tee-shirts try to help, but the streets are clogged with vehicles, barricades disrupt normal traffic flow, and the sidewalks are hopelessly jammed with people who have no idea where they’re going and no idea how to get there. Think “leaving a professional sporting event” and superimpose it on an entire city for four days. It is not a pretty sight and not an enjoyable experience.

After using one of the free rental bikes that the convention is providing, and having some teens in an SUV shout, “Get off the road, old man, you’re going about one mile an hour,” I returned to my pedestrian status and made my way through the hawkers selling “Barack-Abye-Baby” sleepy suits and the phalanxes of helmeted, jackbooted police who almost outnumber the pedestrians. It was 85 degrees and rising.

Due to a bit of good luck I had a pass to get into the Pepsi Center where the convention itself is being held. So I decided to put the travails of the day behind me and go through the check points and barricades to hear what I could of the speeches.

It was like nothing so much as a rock concert in a big arena. Crowds surged around the walkways pushing and jostling and buying nachos and limp pizza. People sold buttons and tee shirts and Democratic paraphernalia destined to collect dust in closets all across America .

I found my designated section halfway to the nosebleed section on an impossible sideways angle to the speaker’s platform. The platform was like a thrust stage in a mega-church, with a podium on a five foot high half-circle that protruded into the audience. The speakers came out one by one from behind a curtained area.

On either side of the speaker’s podium, set back and raised, were darkened seating areas for a few important folks. One side was filled with a house band that had the musical tightness of a Muscle Shoals session group. Between speakers they played hard driving instrumentals that were blasted through the darkened arena while spotlights strafed the audience. Just after I found my seat the band launched into a high energy, trumpet-and-sax led five minute jam of James Brown’s “Gonna Have a Funky Good Time.”

I felt like I was on a different planet. James Brown blasting. Lights strobing and strafing. An entire arena on its feet waving American flags in unison. Men in blue business suits thrusting their arms upward to implore the audience to get up and party. Yet, in spite of myself, I was beginning to have a funky good time.

Caroline Kennedy came out. Haloed in the speaker’s light in the otherwise dark arena, she seemed wraithlike and almost ethereal. She spoke softly, giving a personal testimonial about her “Uncle Teddy.” When she finished, a video tribute to Ted Kennedy appeared on monitors throughout the darkened hall. It was filled with his voice and his vision and his hope. It seemed like a eulogy for an era.

As the video finished, the arena became silent. Out of the darkness a voice on the speaker system announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Senator Ted Kennedy,” and the senator, like an aged, wounded lion, was led to the podium. Spontaneously, the entire audience rose as one and let out a cheer that had more love in it than anything I had ever heard. It was the cheer of thanks from a generation.

I found myself cascading back to 1963 when I stood, confused, at my high school locker as my civics teacher walked by and said, “The president’s been shot.” I felt myself tumbling through time, seeing the dreams of my generation shot on balconies and podiums, watching my friends come home wounded and broken from a war that should never have been fought, standing helpless as my country turned from one of vision and caring to one of self-aggrandizement and self-absorption. And then I looked down at the man, fighting a battle now that he cannot win, and realized that I was looking at the link to the hope that my generation had lost, and watching him hand that torch of hope - the hope he himself had never lost — to the generation that is now coming into its own.

I did not stay for Michelle Obama’s speech. I gave my arena pass to someone else so they could hear her shape that hope for a new generation.

I walked out into a Denver night that seemed cooler and more hospitable. The lights of the prairies to the east twinkled like distant stars. The shadows of the mountains to the west loomed up like peaceful, silent monuments.

Maybe, I thought, the teens in the SUV were right: maybe it’s time for me to get off the road. After all, I am a little wobbly and I do move about one mile per hour. Time to let those with a sense of urgency get moving.

So, now it’s up to them.

I wish them well. Their struggles will be no less than ours, their dreams no less real and visionary. I only hope that they will remember the courage of folks like Ted Kennedy as they travel, and use his vision to guide us further down the path of this strange and crazy journey called “democracy”.

At long last we know who the candidates are going to be. I, personally, hope that Obama chooses Hillary as his running mate despite the issues of electoral value and the unpredictability of Bill. As to John McCain, I am indifferent to his choice so long as the end result is a loss for the Republicans.

This is not to say that I don’t respect John McCain. He has earned our respect by what he did for the country, even though he almost erased that claim to respect by his unsavory involvement with Charles Keating and the Savings and Loan scandal. But no one will remember that, and even if they did, few of us have any real understanding of its true significance and complexities.

My concern now is the way our electoral system turns candidates’ assets into liabilities, and the way the press foments these misinterpretations. You may rest assured that the candidate who grows and changes his opinion will be accused of “waffling” and “flip-flopping.” The candidate who attempts to be civil and accommodating will be questioned about his toughness. Acting the belligerent bully will be seen as a sign of leadership qualities. Thus it has always been, even when wrapped in soft velvet as it was by Ronald Reagan. One can only hope that the current cabal of jackals — Bush, Rove, Cheney, and Rumsfeld — has soured us on such behavior and revealed its dangerous underbelly.

What bothers me the most is that the nature and quality of discourse that we accept from our candidates would result in our children being sent to their rooms if they were to practice it with their friends. Already we have seen McCain become a barking terrier nipping at Obama’s flesh; Obama become dissembling and disingenuous when forced to jettison his friend and mentor, Jeremiah Wright; and Hillary become a passive-aggressive whiner taking around-the-corner shots at Obama and the press for situations almost entirely of her own creation.

This is a sad state of affairs. These are good people. We each have our horse in the race, but anyone with an ounce of forgiveness and compassion sees that these, and the other candidates now fallen by the wayside, are concerned human beings with strengths and flaws no different than our own. Unlike the present administration, I see no cruelty in any of them. Yet our measure of their worthiness is their success at a game of “gotcha!” If they can avoid getting caught more than their opponents, they are likely to win.

What I would like to see is an attitude of tolerance and forgiveness on the part of each of the candidates and the press. Allow the candidates to be themselves, to make mistakes, to correct their mistakes, and to move on. Let them reveal themselves to best advantage in a long, slow unwinding of their thoughts and beliefs and ideas about governing. Give them room to adapt and grow.

Then, make your choice.

By my lights, the choice should not be hard. But the issue beneath the issue is that we must find a way to allow our candidates to show themselves to best advantage, not to measure their worthiness by how well they stand up under absurd questioning and relentless, often irrational and irrelevant scrutiny. To say that this sort of pressure is what is needed to temper the presidential steel is to promote a negative as a way to uncover a positive. It’s like saying if I spank my child enough, I’ll find out what he or she is made of. Perhaps this is a good way to determine who will be a good Marine, but, I submit, it is not a good way to raise a child or to determine who will be a good president.

So let’s watch and see how this plays out. We may well have broken some barriers in who we can choose as candidates. Now it’s time to break some barriers in finding ways to assess them.

I received this email from a man whose path crossed mine several years ago. He is an exceptional human being involved in exceptional work: several years ago he took off went to Gambia to do some doctoring for no reason other than it was a way to serve. His blogs and stories were the stuff of a modern day Schweitzer, though he would likely deny the similarity.

Anyway, he sent me a response of one of his friends to my last blog on Hillary. I find it instructive. I’m sending it on to you with my response attached. I would love to see others write their thoughts in the “comments” section at the bottom of my blog.

Here is the exchange:

Kent, here’s an email I got from a friend after pointing him to your latest “News from..” column.

Geoff

And my response to his response:

Hi David,

Good to hear from you. I stand in awe of what you’ve done since we met several years ago. We’re too old to have heroes, but we can certainly have exemplars, and you have proven to be one. Thanks for what you do.

Your friend is a smart man. I heard the same thing from a national photographer who was covering Hillary in Pine Ridge. He had been shadowing various candidates since before New Hampshire. He said that he thought McCain was going to win because the middle of America didn’t like Obama. He wasn’t as convinced that it was pure racism, but that was one ingredient in a stew that was potent and boiling. “There are no people that look like us” in Obama’s audiences, he said, referring to middle aged white guys.

Unscientific? Perhaps. But those were his words.

Perhaps my hope is based on being the father of a 19 year old who grabbed one of his friends and went to the Obama speech at the Excel Center last night. I guess I still believe in, or hope for, a “Children’s Crusade.” After all, we had one when we were young, though we didn’t pose it in those terms. Old white folks always come out to vote; perhaps young folks of all colors will be energized to do so by Obama. It’s my wish — more than that, it’s almost my prayer.

The frightening thing is that McCain even has a chance. If the Democrats can’t win this one, they should fold up their tent. They’re running against one of the weakest candidates in memory; they’re running on the worst economic situation in memory; and they’re running against easily the worst president in my lifetime and, perhaps, in the history of the republic. If they lose this, what hope is there?

At this one moment in time I have to refuse to let myself be as cynical as your friend, though I fear that his cynicism is simply realism. If we start to see some swiftboating bulletheads turning Obama into an upper class white man, and the Democrats let it happen, I’ll buy your friend a drink and we can drown our collective sorrows. But, for now, I’ve got to believe in the light in the young people’s eyes.

Thanks for writing. May our paths cross again.

Kent

If any of you have thoughts, please weigh in. Is Hillary’s constant refrain that she’s the candidate with the best chance to beat McCain really just realpolitik in action? Is it really just code for, “A black man can’t win”?

A number of folks have written to ask where I’ve gone. For a number of reasons I’ve chosen to stay quiet during the political season. I’ve needed my writing time for my books, and the political season is so seductive that I dare not write the first word or, like a reformed smoker deciding “just one can’t hurt,” I’ll fall off the wagon and find myself blogging every day about the political situation. So I’ve sworn off blogging while the political pot is boiling.

I would like to make one entry, though. It comes after standing on the windblown plaza in front of the Little Wound school in Kyle, South Dakota, watching Hillary make a speech to a small group of maybe 150 folks deep in the folds of the Pine Ridge reservation. I had recently had the good fortune to hear both her and Obama give presentations in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and I was impressed. This was a chance to see her up close (within about 20 feet) and see what she was like in a truly unfamiliar environment. What would she wear to show solidarity with the sweatshirt and blue jeans crowd on the rez? Would she reach down and pet one of the wandering rez dogs? Would she give a booming “fill the hall” oration to a group of several hundred? Would she have some policy initiatives or just “turn the crank” one more time?

Well, the answers were simple: she wore a well-chosen calf length black coat that was either from Christian Dior or Wal-Mart, thus appearing to be in sync with the rez folks whose favorite color is black; she petted no rez dogs; she started her speech slowly and unimpressively, but became animated and passionate when she hit on the theme of health care and started getting some response from the audience. She had me until she started her usual disingenuous thundering about making every vote count, which, sadly and irritatingly, is just an inversion of a whine about why she should be given the nomination. In that moment she became mean-spirited and unpleasant, and I left to go across the street to get a burrito.

Nonetheless, it was a rare experience seeing her in a small crowd on the rez, and it reminded me of everything that has me frustrated, confused, and, ultimately, dissatisfied with her as a candidate.

First of all, as in Grand Forks, she was uncommonly well-prepared. In Grand Forks, Obama gave one of his stem-winders about hope, with a few vague references to North Dakota sprinkled in. He was galvanizing, uplifting, and likable.

Hillary, running late, was like listening to the professor after listening to the preacher. She was whisked in from the airport and gave a solid, nuts and bolts talk that referenced very specific problems in the Dakotas and farm country. She knew her facts and had her policy proposals well prepared. She seldom referred to her notes. In short, she knew her stuff about a place that, frankly, neither she nor Obama cares one damn bit about. But, as in her talk on the rez, she was alive to the issues and had good, solid, helpful, and practical things to say, far more than did Obama.

As I watched her warm the dour Indian crowd on that plaza, I kept saying to myself, as I had in Grand Forks, “Damn! This woman knows her stuff. We’d do well with her at the helm. She could get things done.”

But just as I entertain this thought, another truth reveals itself: she has convictions but no principles. Anyone who is even mildly objective knows that her grand posturing about making every vote count is nothing more than her way of trying to get the party to include the results of the Florida and Michigan primaries. If there is anyone alive who believes that she would be making the same demand had Obama won in those states, I’d like to meet them. The hard truth is that Clinton consistently wraps self-serving ends in high-minded rhetoric about the common good. It is the curse of the Clintons: their policies and hearts are in the right place, but they have no principles about how they will get themselves in a position to effect those policies.

Such behavior is, of course, part of politics. But one should have moral clarity if one wishes to make claims on principle. If you would not hold the same position if it did not benefit you, you should look closely in a mirror before making grand claims about the high minded principles you are asserting.

In the end, it makes Hillary unlikeable, because it sets her high minded claims in stark contrast to her venal self-serving. In some ways it is no different than Hubert Humphrey, but Humphrey was protected by the simple fact that he seemed to genuinely like people. Hillary does not exude the same feeling. She didn’t seem to care about those Lakotas who were listening to her; she cared about their causes.

This is a valid political position. But she would be better served by taking the political stance of Lyndon Johnson, who said, famously, “If you grab them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” She could grab the political process by the balls and move it to some solid, humane positions that have been lost, if not destroyed, during the deranged reign of George W.

But the unnerving self-serving nature of her movement from position to position to gain electoral leverage is unsettling and, ultimately, unappetizing. She moves her arguments wherever she has to in order to continue toward her goals. I’d be a whole lot more comfortable if she simply said, “I want to win because I’m the most experienced candidate with the best ideas, and I’m going to twist this political process every way I can to get into power to turn those ideas into policy. Watch me work.” But she doesn’t. She’s always asserting some high principle of democracy, but she discards a principle as easily as she discards outfits meant to make her look like the audience to whom she is speaking.

It is, indeed, sad that she sought to grab the hour just as Obama came onto the scene. But it happened. Now she has to accept it gracefully, and she is being anything but graceful. She is being bullheaded and unsavory. Her end game makes you want to hold your nose. Yes, she might still eke out a victory — though I doubt it — but at what price? That is the question. For my money, the ends do not justify the means, because the means will taint the end. It is time for her to withdraw with grace and civility. I hope she does so.

I, personally, moved to the Obama camp long ago. My reasons are simple: he puts hope in the eyes and hearts of young people. My generation was deeply wounded by the assassinations, cover-ups, governmental lies, and Viet Nam. Many of us, myself included, became deeply cynical about the political process. We were troubled by our emotional disenfranchisement and hoped not to pass it on to our children. We retreated to the local, or, in many cases, to the personal. The void was filled by a strange breed that took their cues from Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, David Stockman, and others who made the flawed case that seeking the personal good would ultimately benefit the common good. This point of view still holds sway.

These proponents of the self have hijacked the concept of freedom so that “government” has become synonymous with usurpation of rights, when, in fact, they have used government as a tool of self aggrandizement. Dick Cheney and his minions are among the most polished practitioners of this craft. Blessedly, their moral bankruptcy and self-serving manipulations have become too obvious for even the blindest to ignore. But they have been able to do this because those of us from my generation have either abdicated our political responsibility, gone over to the dark side of flat-out self-serving capitalism, or disappeared into a navel gazing that is wrapped in neo-Buddhist or psychologized claims that one must fix the self before one fixes society. In this latter case, the practitioners never quite get around to society, because the self is an ever expanding and self-renewing need.

Those of us who feel caught in this trap look at the Nelson Mandelas, Lech Walesas, and Vaclav Havels, and say, “May one like you come along and do for our country what you have done for yours.” To me, Obama is the closest we have. And I’ll hitch my geriatric wagon to his star if that’s what it takes to get the kids to look skyward with hope.

So I tip my hat to Hillary. She is a good person who has better and more fully thought out policy ideas than Barack. But she missed her moment. The measure is simple: if Obama gets in, he will reach out for Hillary’s expertise. I truly don’t believe Hillary would do the same.

This is a time when a new vision is needed as badly as new policy. Hillary will only be able to offer new policy; Barack might be able to offer them both. May he win, and may he put hope in the eyes of this current generation.