Alice Walker & The 2008 Election

ALICE WALKER- The Guardian, Saturday September 20, 2008

I remember seeing a picture of Fidel Castro in a parade with lots of
other Cubans. It was during the emergency years, the "special period"
when Cuba's relationship with the Soviet Union had collapsed and there
was little gas or oil or fertilizer; people were struggling to find
enough to eat. It was perhaps Cuba's nadir, as a small Caribbean island
nation considered a dangerous threat by its nearest neighbor, the
United States - which, during this period, tightened its embargo. Fidel,
tall, haggard, his clothes hanging more loosely than usual from his
gaunt frame, walked soberly along, surrounded by thousands of likewise
downhearted, fearful people: he, like them, waving a tiny red, white and
blue Cuban flag. This photograph made me weep; not only because I love
Fidel and the Cuban people, but also because I was envious.
However poor the Cubans might be, I realized, they cared about each
other and they had a leader who loved them. A leader who loved them.
Imagine. A leader not afraid to be out in the streets with them, a
leader not ashamed to show himself as troubled and humbled as they were.
A leader who would not leave them to wonder and worry alone, but would
stand with them, walk with them, celebrate with them - whatever the
parade might be.

This is what I want for our country, more than anything. I want a
leader who can love us. This is not what we usually say, or think of,
when we are trying to choose a leader. People like to talk about
"experience" and war and the economy, and making Americans look good
again. I care about all these things. But when the lights are out and
I'm left with just the stars in a super-dark sky, and I feel the new
intense chill that seems to be the underbreath of even the hottest day,
when I know that global warming may send our planet into a deep freeze
even before my remaining years run out, then I think about what it is
that truly matters to me. Not just as a human, but as an American.
I want a leader who can love us. And, truthfully, by our collective
behaviour, we have made it hard to demand this. We are as we are,
imperfect to the max, racist and sexist and greedy above all; still, I
feel we deserve leaders who love us. We will not survive more of what we
have had: leaders who love nothing, not even themselves. We know they
don't love themselves because if they did they would feel compassion for
us, so often lost, floundering, reeling from one bad thought, one horrid
act to another. Killing, under order, folks we don't know; abusing
children of whose existence we hadn't heard; maiming and murdering
animals that have done us no harm.

I would say that, in my lifetime, it was only the Kennedys, in national
leadership, who seemed even to know what compassion meant; certainly
John, and then Bobby, were unafraid to grow an informed and open heart.
(After he left the White House, President Carter blossomed into a
sheltering tree of peace, quite admirably.) I was a student at a
segregated college in Georgia when John Kennedy was assassinated. His
was a moral voice, a voice of someone who had suffered; someone who,
when looking at us in the south, so vulnerable, so poor, so outnumbered
by the violent racists surrounding us, could join his suffering with
ours. The rocking chair in which he sat reminded us that he was somehow
like us: feeling pain on a daily basis and living a full-tilt life in
spite of it. And Bobby Kennedy, whom a mentor of mine, Marian Wright
(later Edelman), brought to Mississippi years later. He had not believed
there were starving children in the United States. Wright took him to
visit the delta. Kneeling before these hungry children in the
Mississippi dirt and heat, he wept. We were so happy to have those
tears. Never before had we witnessed compassion in anyone sent out to
lead us.
The present administration and too many others before it have shown the
most clear and unapologetic hatred for the American people. A contempt
for our minds, our bodies and souls that is so breathtaking most
Americans have numbed themselves not to feel it. How can they do this or
that awful unthinkable thing, we ask ourselves and each other, knowing
no one in power will ever bother to answer us. I'm sure we, the American
people, are the butt of jokes by those in power. Our suffering not
making a dent in their pursuit of goals that almost always bring more
tragedy and degradation to our already fragile, disintegrating
republic.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that
generations of Americans have been willfully crippled, and can no longer
spell or write a sentence. The money for their education has gone to
blow off someone else's intelligent and beautiful head. Visiting a
hospital, I see sick and frightened people who have no clue whether they
will get the care they need or whether it will be 15 minutes of an
incompetent physician's opinion. If we were loved there would be a
doctor free of charge, on every block, with time to listen to us.
Visiting our schools, I see no one has seriously thought about teaching
Americans what to eat, just as no one at the national helm insists that
we take sex education seriously and begin to unencumber our planet of
the projected hordes (Earth's view) of coming generations She can no
longer tolerate.
Our taxes are collected without fail, with no input from us; sometimes,
because we lack jobs, paid with money we have to borrow. Our children
are sent places they never dreamed of visiting, to harm and make enemies
of people who, prior to their arrival, had thought well of them. Kind,
smart, freedom-loving Americans.

When we are offered a John McCain, who is too old for the job (and I
cherish old age and old men but not to lead the world when it is
ailing), or a George Bush, or a Sarah Palin, how unloved we are as
Americans becomes painfully plain. McCain talks of war with the
nostalgia and forgetfulness of the very elderly; Palin talks of forcing
the young to have offspring they neither want nor can sustain; both of
them feel at ease, apparently, with the game in which their candidacy
becomes more of a topic of discussion than whether the planet has a
future under their leadership.

Where does this leave us average Americans, who feel the chill of
global warming, the devastation of war, the terror of the food crisis,
the horror of advancing diseases? Hopefully with a sense of awakening:
that we have had few opportunities to be led by those who have the
capacity to care for us, to love us, and that we, in our lack of love
for ourselves, have, too often, not chosen them. Perhaps with the
certainty that though we are as we are and sorely imperfect, we still
deserve someone in leadership who "gets" us, and that this
self-defeating habit of accepting our leaders' contempt need not
continue. Maybe with the realization that we, the people, are truly the
leaders, and that we are the ones we have been waiting for.

I write on September 9, my father's birthday. A black farmer in
Georgia, he risked his life to vote in the 1930s for a "new deal". If he
had lived and not died in his early 60s of overwork, ill health and
heartbreak, he would be 100 years old in 2009. Voting in November of
2008 for a candidate with heart I will honor his faith.

* Alice Walker 2008