Testify

31Aug08

Two days ago, we watched Barack Obama accept the historic Democratic presidential nomination in front of 38 million viewers, almost 90,000 who were present in the stadium with him.

I’d grown disenchanted with the political process and had lost most of my enthusiasm for Barack. After his speech on Thursday, at the grocery store, I couldn’t help singing and smiling and acting like I didn’t have a care in the world. My candidate understood something about me and he didn’t even know me, and maybe he didn’t even know he understood but it didn’t matter.

What the naysayers don’t get is that it’s not about me it’s about you.

I learned how to be a poet from my teacher Kurt Lamkin. He taught us to write using principles of oral tradition –his focus was to teach us how to write in our heads and hearts, not on paper. He called it Live Poem. We wrote, edited, and performed from memory dozens and dozens of times before choosing a way to document the piece. I was a fiction writer and the only poetry I’d ever written at that point was on the back pages of my diaries and the margins of my highschool notebooks. As far as I understood, like most people, poetry just had to rhyme.

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat.
They took some honey and plenty of money
Wrapped in a five pound note
-Edward Lear

Kurt in the beginning taught us very little. Writing and performing in that class was like jumping into the deep part of the ocean every time. You had to get up in front of your peers, let go of all your inhibitions, and share the things that you harbored in your soul no matter how lost you were because to resist brought everything to a halt. Over that year when I was 20 years old, through the process of writing poetry I found out who I was, and some of what I had inside me.

Kurt repeatedly urged us to let go of ‘trying’ to tell a story, to find the simplest way to say what was in our hearts and it would always rhyme. I learned then that truth has cadence. And we know when we hear the truth because it resonates in our soul.

words coming easy to me:
matchstick,
toothpick,
boy,
shadow of a shadow of a sun
shadow of a shadow of a night
straining to remember your voice…

Maybe Barack knows my teacher.

I became enamored with Barack the same time most people did- during his keynote for the 2004 DNC. Listening to him stirred something inside me that I had never felt in my life. My country and government were always ‘other’. Or maybe it was I who was the ‘other’. Politics and government always happened as part of the country that I only barely felt a part of. Growing up on Long Island as a Filipino American was not necessarily hard but it also wasn’t extraordinary.

When I heard Barack speak that day I felt what many white people must grow up feeling: patriotism or the entitlement to it. He was relaxed, warm, and knew himself well enough to speak to our country in a way I had never heard someone of color speak in my 30 years on this planet. The clarion call I heard that day sang don’t be afraid.

I believe that we have a righteous wind at our backs and that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us.

America! Tonight, if you feel the same energy that I do, if you feel the same urgency that I do, if you feel the same passion that I do, if you feel the same hopefulness that I do — if we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that all across the country, from Florida to Oregon, from Washington to Maine, the people will rise up in November, and John Kerry will be sworn in as President, and John Edwards will be sworn in as Vice President, and this country will reclaim its promise, and out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come.

When he reemerged in 2007 and rumors of his running for president began to circulate I was only moderately interested. The three years that had passed were numbing: the tenacious war, Guantanamo, reality TV. We live in an established culture of despondence, indifference, and cruelty. What began way back in 2001 as a country fascinated with creating and watching shock and awe turned into a world bored by shock and awe.

Barack’s probable campaign also brought up memories of my short-lived enthusiasm for Gen. Wesley Clark in the previous election year. Gen. Clark had won me over with his demand for government transparency on Real Time with Bill Maher. It was so refreshing to hear someone who could convincingly project the persona of a leader and who spoke in an intelligent and compassionate manner.

I put up campaign signs in my cubicle at work only to draw ridicule from coworkers. Gedi Sibony, an artist I admire, vandalized my propaganda. Next to the words ‘PATRIOT’, ‘HONOR’, EXPERIENCE’, he carefully wrote words like ‘TRAITOR’, ‘MANIPULATIVE’, ‘EGO’ in very careful penmanship. This was the first time as an adult that I voiced my political opinion openly and wasn’t sure how to respond to someone questioning my enthusiasm. My response was to print out more signs, only this time in color and self-laminated.

When I went to hear Gen. Clark speak at Hunter College just a couple of blocks away from work, I was faced with the disappointment of the man in person as opposed to the man on television. Clark had lost his voice and was speaking very quietly and with great difficulty. He had no presence and there was the feeling that he was there like all of us, waiting for a revelation.

One of the grade school kids standing behind him as part of the stagecraft keeled over before Clark’s speech had even begun. Clark made a joke about soldiers learning to never stand with their knees locked. The kid was ok but I wasn’t…his fainting turned out to be the most exciting part of Gen. Clark’s speech. I left still liking Clark but only for his sake and not mine. When his campaign dwindled I’d ceased to care.

When Barack Obama announced his candidacy in 2007 I was happy but more inclined to like Hillary. I watched every debate and began a year-long vigil with CNN. I remember going back and forth between the two candidates, always landing on the side of Hillary because Hillary is fantastic and that she is a woman is only a bonus and then when you think of her gender as a bonus it’s a revelation.

At the thorniest point of the heated Clinton-Obama battle, enter Rev. Jeremiah Wright saying blasphemous and fantastic things:

When it came to putting her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in interment prison camps.

When it came to putting the citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters. Put them on auction blocks. Put them in cotton fields. Put them in inferior schools. Put them in substandard housing. Put them in scientific experiments. Put them in the lower paying jobs. Put them outside the equal protection of the law. Kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness.

The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law and then wants us to sing God Bless America. Naw, naw, naw. Not God Bless America. God Damn America! That’s in the Bible. For killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating us citizens as less than human. God Damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and she is Supreme.

What the Reverend said was what many of us feel in our hearts. It’s what many non-whites think and take for granted everyday. If these were Obama’s roots, he deserved more credit from me. It was revolutionary. But I knew that it couldn’t remain so and Barack would have to choose between his roots and winning. I thought however he chooses he’ll lose.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their world view in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

The day he gave his race speech, I was at work. I got an email from his campaign saying that he had just delivered a very important speech on race. I watched him on youtube and felt a soaring pride because I could picture how he came to write what he did and I reveled in his bravery to share it with all of us. He didn’t disavow (at that point) or discredit his Reverend and mentor. He took the time to think about why he believed in Rev. Wright, why he looked to Wright for spiritual guidance and in his heart he could see how all those things that Wright preached and believed could be true but could just as easily be not true. Obama has the ability to identify the nuances of his feelings and even greater, he knows how to write them down so those that want to understand can understand. The day Barack delivered ‘A More Perfect Union’ was when I left Hillary for good but I’ll always love her.

Hillary Clinton at the 2008 DNC:
This is the story of America. Of women and men who defy the odds and never give up. How do we give this country back to them?

By following the example of a brave New Yorker , a woman who risked her life to shepherd slaves along the Underground Railroad. And on that path to freedom, Harriett Tubman had one piece of advice:

If you hear the dogs, keep going.
If you see the torches in the woods, keep going.
If they’re shouting after you, keep going.
Don’t ever stop. Keep going.
If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.
Even in the darkest of moments, ordinary Americans have found the faith to keep going.

I’ve seen it in you. I’ve seen it in our teachers and firefighters, nurses and police officers, small business owners and union workers, the men and women of our military – you always keep going.

Over the next few months I would give small amounts to Barack’s campaign. I live paycheck to paycheck and the only other time I ever wrote a check for a cause was Katrina. But I was enthusiastic, utterly in love with my brave candidate. My friends and I would have heated debates in the Bowery Hotel Lounge, over dinner or in cars. Politics, the world, Obama …there was so much to say so many closed doors in our minds to open and I felt for the first time as an adult that the world didn’t have to be this way. The world didn’t have to be so sad. I didn’t have to be so sad.

As with anything that lasts longer than a few months, the mind grows tired and righteousness needs a break. Barack won the primary and his battle to do so took it’s toll. I was so tired of all the maneuvering even though I understood and understand that it’s an inherent part of the process. It’s politics, not real life.

My disenchantment grew and I stopped my little donations to the campaign. I heard about FISA, Senator Palmer, his joke about short Asians, and that his campaign had misspelled Anna Wintour’s name (an ardent supporter and fundraiser) and they didn’t care! I began to observe Obama with suspicion. I resigned myself, as Bill Maher said on Larry King, to not finding my ideological candidate. I would vote for him when the time came and I would only bring up my doubts with good friends. But for me the rush of empowerment was gone. I did with Barack what I do with most people–I placed him squarely in the category of big fat phony.

I believed alot of the negative things that were said about him. That he was a rabidly ambitious politician that soars on rhetoric and charisma. That he doesn’t have the experience to be Commander-in-chief. That his experience as a community organizer isn’t sufficient preparation for the office of President of the United States. These things may be true, in fact likely true. But after his speech on Thursday I realized it doesn’t matter. I would support him and fight for him if those things were true times two.

On Thursday, August 28 2008, he and his team delivered an event that was most spectacular in all good ways–not in a kill, destroy, humiliate way. In fact many of the speakers had their speeches edited by Obama’s staff to strike any negative attacks on McCain. He produced an event that drew more people than a political rally had ever drawn. He said ‘I’m going to have it in a football stadium and I’m going to fill that stadium’. And he did.

In that moment, the most serious one of his life, carrying hundreds of thousands even millions of hopes out onto that podium with him he took a breath and delivered what we as a generation needed: the truth of his soul. And in my assessment it rhymed.

That promise is our greatest inheritance. It’s a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours – a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.

And it is that promise that forty five years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln’s Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.

The men and women who gathered there could’ve heard many things. They could’ve heard words of anger and discord. They could’ve been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred.

But what the people heard instead – people of every creed and color, from every walk of life – is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.

“We cannot walk alone,” the preacher cried. “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”

America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise – that American promise – and in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

Thank you, God Bless you, and God Bless the United States of America.

post script:


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