Life by a Thousand Breaths

I remember how I felt upon returning to Washington State in September of 2004. I had completed an incredible journey that had taken me to the Democratic and Republican national conventions, in Boston and NYC respectively. I returned hopeful that Bush would be defeated, it seemed then that everything I had learned on that trip pointed to a Bush defeat. It is hard to say what really happened a month or so later, but even if Kerry had won, my enthusiasm for him had been limited to the speech he had given to congress as a young Vietnam War veteran. Beyond that I found him to be practically free of character, he was a man without qualities.

It seemed like days after the election, in a hopeless gloom that I believe will be unmatched by any future period of my life, the phrase “He’s ready. Why wait?...” first entered my ear. I had missed his speech to the convention in Boston, I was outside in the streets. When I found my way to the exceedingly lovely home of a good friend’s parents outside of the city that night, it was all they were talking about. Later when I saw the speech, heard it first and then later watched it online, I saw a nervous man, who was anything but tenuous. It was the urgency in his tone, it was the clear recognition by him of the weight of his responsibility to his message. I always said that I liked it best when Jerry Garcia stepped to the microphone to sing a lyric after a long mystical jam that had exceeded his own expectations of it. He appeared to me to be ‘at gunpoint’ he had no choice but to step forward and sing. His life depended on it. That is what I saw in Barack Obama when I watched that speech from the convention.

For the interceding years, I have suffered in my heart the travails of our world. I would have done that no matter what had happened regarding the executive branch of the US government. I am sufficiently skeptical of the government to not blame it for all of the worlds troubles. My pain was compounded however by the reckless, arrogant, ignorant, incurious, absent and sometimes plain malign occupant of the White House. It was not the major events, the big decisions the tremendous errors that eroded my spirit so much as the daily degradation, the ocean of despair filled with a million tears, shed for a million tragedies.

Throughout those years, the tune would ring again in my head on occasion. In fact I sang it out often. Interchanging the lines of the verse randomly, annoying the hell out of my daughter. I am sure a few people first learned who Obama was from me, singing that tune. Many of them said then that there was no way a black man would be elected president of the United States. Especially one named Barack Obama, William Jefferson maybe but... I attended our caucus in Washington State, and vigorously supported Barack Obama. I spoke on his behalf, and dismissed the concerns about too many rednecks in the country for a black president to be elected. I assured the concerned woman by citing my own red neck concealed by my own long hair, and citing my childhood in Pennsylvania as a source for evidence about why he would in fact win the state in the general. Without my encouraging, my precinct was overwhelmingly supporting Barack Obama.

Today Ruth Bader Ginsburg underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer. I breathed a sigh of relief. Utah wilderness was spared the drill bit and the hydraulic fluid spills that accompany exploration and extraction. Yesterday millionaire executives were publicly humiliated for their solipsism. An offer was made to Russia that would reduce ICBMs by 80%. An attorney general who considers torture illegal, and believes justice applies to everyone equally was confirmed. A few days earlier an envoy was sent to the middle east with instructions to listen. School children were read to by the first black president. Secret prisons were closed. Rendition was returned to its pre-Bush era criteria. Aid agencies were relieved of the fear that religious zealots would demand they return funds for discussing forbidden medical procedures with clients. Science replaced desired outcomes as the means to determine policy. A president addressed the muslim world as a coherent and sensible partner for cooperation. After what feels like many years of the steady dripping erosion of my spirit this is what life by a thousand breaths feels like.