The Audacity of Hope

I recently started reading Barack Obama's book The Audacity of Hope, a gift which I received for Christmas. I'm only on the second chapter at this point, but I have found myself inspired and uplifted by a few things I've seen thus far. I agree with much of what Senator Obama has written and, sadly, find myself among the ranks of folks that he speaks of in his book... those that focus more on what drives us apart instead of that which we have in common.

You see, I am a liberal. Always have been and likely always will be. That is simply the perspective from which I view life and politics. I've consistently found the need to vehemently defend most anything liberal and criticize that which might be considered conservative. I've even gone so far to be outright unfriendly and hostile toward conservative viewpoints. Why? Because I've always focused on the differences between conservatives and myself.

However, after a little soul-searching and a lot of inspiration from Senator Obama, I see the err of my ways. While I know that old habits die hard, I'm committed to being more open-minded, tolerant, understanding, empathic, and philosophically considerate of those views that are different from my own. I am committed to looking beyond the surface of the politics cesspool that we trudge through today, leaving the sludge of differences behind and instead focusing on the commonalities we share.

I thought I would share a few paragraphs from Obama's book that I found particularly eye-opening and engaging. For me, at least, these words touched a part of me that yearns for change and wants to believe that things can be different, better.

"It is to say that after all the trappings of office -- the titles, the staff, the security details -- are stripped away, I find the President and those who surround him to be pretty much like everybody else, possessed of the same mix of virtues and vices, insecurities and long-buried injuries, as the rest of us. No matter how wrongheaded I might consider their policies to be -- and no matter how much I might insist that they be held accountable for the results of such policies -- I still find it possible, in talking to these men and women, to understand their motives, and to recognize in them values I share.

This is not an easy posture to maintain in Washington. The stakes involved in Washington policy debates are often so high -- whether we send our young men and women to war; whether we allow stem cell research to go forward -- that even small differences in perspective are magnified. The demands of part loyalty, the imperative of campaigns, and the amplification of conflict by the media all contribute to an atmosphere of suspicion. Moreover, most people who serve in Washington have been trained as either as lawyers or political operatives -- professions that tend to place a premium on winning arguments rather than solving problems. I can see how, after a certain amount of time in the capital, it becomes tempting to assume that those who disagree with you have fundamentally different values -- indeed, that they are motivated by bad faith, and perhaps are bad people."

...

"More often, though, finding the right balance between our competing values is difficult. Tensions arise not because we have steered a wrong course, but simply because we live in a complex and contradictory world. I firmly believe, for example, that since 9/11, we have played fast and loose with constitutional principles in the fight against terrorism. But I acknowledge that even the wisest president and most prudent Congress would struggle to balance the critical demands of our collective security against the equally compelling need to uphold civil liberties. I believe our economic policies pay too little attention to the displacement of manufacturing workers and the destruction of manufacturing towns. But I cannot wish away the sometimes competing demands of economic security and competitiveness.

Unfortunately, too often in our national debates we don't even get to the point where we weigh these difficult choices. Instead, we either exaggerate the degree to which policies we don't like impinge on our most sacred values, or play dumb when our own preferred policies conflict with important countervailing values. Conservatives, for instance, tend to bristle when it comes to government interference in the marketplace or their right to bear arms. Yet many of these same conservatives show little to no concern when it comes to government wiretapping without a warrant or government attempts to control people's sexual practices. Conversely, it's easy to get most liberals riled up about government's encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman's reproductive freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potential costs of regulation to a small business owner, you will often draw a blank stare.

In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we draw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship ... No one is exempt from the call to find common ground."