Sunday,
October 12, 2008
Call Me a Naive Italian American Jew: A
Love Letter to Obama
The Annotico Report
It
The
by Alex Gallo-Brown
October 2008
....My mom grew
up Jewish among Jews; my dad Italian among Italians; and I grew up an Italian-Jewish
kid with little connection to either heritage, ...
I know Im
supposed to be cynical about Barack Obama. The political process is broken, the
cynics say, crushed by three decades of Republican rule, undermined by a
stupefiedor stupid-friedelectorate, and sabotaged by a media industrial complex
the likes of which Dwight Eisenhower could never have imagined.
The naysayers
tell me that Barack Obama is just another politician, motivated by ego,
programmed to manipulate. Change, they scoff, is simply another
slogan cooked up by the politicos in Washington and the greed-is-good guys on
Wall Street, and Obama is as beholden to special interests as George W. Bush.
Even if he does manage to convince the American people to overcome hundreds of
years of ingrained racism to elect him, what will he really do?
There is some
truth to this, of course. The system is brokennot least, in my view, because of
the so-called Chattering Class, those venal, egomaniacal babblers who occupy
cable television; ostensibly watchdogs of our government, they are actually
daily betrayers of the public trustand Obama is most certainly a politician.
Even so, I
believe in him. And to explain why, ........
Call me naove. But two years ago, Barack Obama came to speak in my
high-school gym, the same gym from the Martin Luther King Day assembly. (I had
long since graduated, but my brother was a student there now). At the time,
Obama was the junior senator from the state of
And so he began
to speak directly to the people who had come to mock him. He spoke in a voice
filled with respect and sadness, and also a kind of cautious optimism. It was
an expansive voice, encompassing both the sniping of the protesters and the
good will of his supportersnot a drowning out, but a bringing in. It was a
voice that spoke to that same joy I felt standing in those bleachers as a
freshman, to that gratitude of inclusionand to the pain I experienced as an
outsider with my head in the woodchips. It addressed the paralyzing
disappointment I felt when Bush was reelected. It wasnt so much a voice as a signal, a signal that it
was all right to care again, to consider the future of our society. To harness that awesome power.
If Barack Obama
is elected president, he will no doubt, in certain regards, be just another
politician. I may be naove, but I can acknowledge
this much. Politics is a game of compromise and navigation, and the president
has only so much power to control policy. Things will not just magically get
better.
But the election
of Barack Obama is not about a new array of policy positions. It is not about
the Iraq War or our plunging economy, though there is little doubt he will work
toward troop withdrawal, establishing a national healthcare system, and a
framework for green energy.
The election of
Barack Obama instead would be a signal to all of us in this country who are
tempted by cynicism and by nihilism, those of us prone to half-hearted
criticism and full-hearted despair, that while now is the time to shift the
governments course, its also an opportunity for a more important kind
of changein our attitudes towards each other.
Call me naove, but the election of Barack Obama would be a signal
that we are remembering how to love.