I just spent an hour+ live blogging the Obama "closing argument" speech hosted by the very smart Writes Like She Talks blogger Jill Miller Zimon. The speech was great – I’ve placed some of it here for you in case you missed it – and very inspiring. It’s also interesting what one chooses to write as the speech moves on. I surprised myself – both at the idealism I can still summon after having lived through John Kennedy and the 60s — and at the ideas that still make my heart stand up. It is so exciting to hear them couched in terms of one America, coming together to find solutions, listening to "our better angels" as Abraham Lincoln called them in his first inaugural address. Here’s how Lincoln closed that address – does it sound familiar?
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not
be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our
bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every
battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all
over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when
again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our
nature.
It is this sense of bringing together that transcends even the policies and changes pledged by Senator Obama. I fear that if America doesn’t find a way to come together now, we will spin apart for good. If we don’t find a way to show a unified, committed and moral face to the rest of the world, all that we have stood for will dissolve – as it has already begun to do.
For years I have been haunted by this poem — by Percy Bysshe Shelley , that I feared prophesied our fate. It is what I was afraid I saw happening and it is what I honestly believe we have but one more chance to face down. Listen:
Ozymandius by: Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1817)I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Do you ever worry that all we have become could be lost? That our arrogance, or laziness, or the cravenness of some of our leaders (and some of us) will devour all the idealism that helped to build what we are? These fears have stayed with me. I know that this country is like none other. Joe Klein once said "Judge a country with the open door standard. When you open the door, do people try to get in or try to get out?" By those standards, our greatness remains.
But we need to return to that American sense of possibility – of duty and commitment, that brought us this far, that got the Greatest Generation through the Depression and World War II, that informed the marchers in Selma and Montgomery, the Peace Corps and Vista volunteers, the Teach for America teachers, the anti-war movement; that motivated the philanthropy of many of great wealth – including many of the tech billionaires emerging from our most recent explosion of American ingenuity — and that motivated those who joined the military to help protect us all. That is the American that Obama speaks to and the America the world so admires. I hope we receive the opportunity to recapture and enhance that part of ourselves. I fear this election may be our last chance.