Prior to the American Presidential elections of 2008, I found myself in the US for a few weeks while preparing to sit the New York Bar Exam. For most of this time, I stayed just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. This was February; the heart of the Primary season and the anticipation was palpable. It was as though there was electricity in the air that raced across the heart of the entire country. Everyone had an opinion and everyone seemed to have a hope. Among Blacks around the globe, much of the excitement had to do in large measure to race, but this cannot completely explain the pervasive enthusiasm shared amongst a vast cross-section of the population of the globe. For the eight years previous, there had been a tidal wave of hopelessness and uncertainty. Many viewed President George W. Bush as obstinate, ineloquent and perhaps ineffective. George W. Bush, who had once hailed himself as a unifier, had become certainly one of the most divisive figures of my era. The world was now ready for a change. The world was now bold and audacious in its hopefulness. The eagerly anticipated CHANGE seemed inevitable. The world seemed poised for renaissance.
What Barack Obama represented was this hope. He brought to the world’s stage a brand new era not only in politics but also in culture. It seemed as though all of humanity’s innate cravings for peace and harmony vested solely upon this eloquent Hawaiian who just a few years before had been a complete unknown. His words wove a tapestry that spoke to the hearts and minds of all who heard them. By and large, those who listened to his speeches were left convinced that their political messiah had finally arrived. Save those controversies, which cunningly concocted by his adversaries, there was nothing controversial about Mr. Obama: he was a man who represented everything that everyone wanted, and it was because of this, that I was extremely concerned.
To my mind, the world is divided into three major categories of people: 25% who stand on the two extremes of each issue and 50% who stand, to varying degrees, in the middle. The extreme sides can never agree and the only way to move issues forward is either to sway the middle or to pacify it. Barack Obama however, appeared to appeal to everyone. His positions were amorphous to the point that no one could reasonably disagree with him. He was in favor of kittens and sunny days. He was going to unite all Americans behind the belief that America was a great nation. The problem is that while there are these three categories of people (the left, the right and those in the middle) who never agree on anything, there are argument-transcending certainties that are just taken as fact. For instance, no reasonable person is anti-kitten or anti-sunny day. However, to me, Barack Obama appeared to take facts, turn them into controversies and then feign consensus where there was no disagreement in existence. Where there was a controversy, he deftly straddled the slight lines of agreement all while never presenting an actual view. His ‘if by whiskey you mean social turmoil, I am vehemently against but if by whiskey you mean more small town revenue, then I am all for it’ rhetoric led to overwhelming agreement; although in my mind, no one seemed to know what it was they were agreeing with. To paraphrase the Bard, in my eyes, Barack Obama was little more than a poor player strutting and fretting upon the stage. His words were full of sound and fury and signified nothing.
Now, my worst fears appear realized: nearly two years later, the hope has escaped from the Obama administration like air rushing from a balloon. The excitement has turned to disenchantment, and apathy has returned to the masses like a once eradicated epidemic. Young people, wrenched from their indifference, flocked to Mr. Obama and once his victory was obtained they waited, breath abated, for the kinder friendlier world that his hope and change campaign seemed to promise, but the danger has always been that such a world would not come. They have wiped the faith from their eyes and to see that such a world has not come and in all likelihood would not come. President Obama’s ability to avoid disagreement now appears like indecisiveness. His desire for consensus and bipartisanship seems nothing more than weakness and inactivity. The young and once enthused who were waiting for the world to change are still waiting, only now it is far more devastating for they are waiting for the fulfilment of promises that allowed them to glimpse the bit of sky that they secretly dreamed of but never admitted yearning for. The funny thing about hope is that in can survive with the face of almost total darkness but when the last candle is extinguished, so is the illumination that hope brings. It is much easier to climb a mountain when you are starting at the bottom than it is to start from the middle once you have had the precipice just outside of your grasp. It is during the slide down the peak’s face that the hope’s final glow dies, leaving one no life with which to tackle the task once more. I fear that Barack Obama was not the beginning of hope for this generation but rather the end of it. I fear the hope that the world exuded, during those unforgettable days in 2008 will not be felt again; at least not in my generation for we now truly know the reason that hope rested in the bottom of Pandora’s accursed jar.
Audley Hanna
