endorses Obama.
The strange case of the swooning co-ed
by Bill McKibben
Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 06:49:41 AM PST
Since it’s impossible to really know in advance how a president will turn out, I’m nowhere near as confident as all the people I keep reading online ("Obama’s a fraud!" "Obama’s going to be the greatest president since Roosevelt.") But we all have to vote, and so we sift through what little we know, and try to make sense of it. For me, one odd little incident from the morning of the New Hampshire primary keeps replaying itself in my head.
I’d gone to hear Barack Obama speak, the first time I’d heard him in person. It was breakfast time, at Dartmouth, and so he wasn’t in full dazzle mode. (In fact, his wife gave a better talk). But at some point in his oration, when he was going pretty strong, a college student down front swooned--fainted dead away.
Obama saw it happen, and he had people clear a space for her so that the EMT could get through with a stretcher. And then, for the ten minutes it took to get her out of there, he did something unusual: nothing.
Bill McKibben's diary :: ::
Twice he told the crowd: ‘I can see her arms moving, she’s going to be okay. Don’t worry.’ But other than that he stood on stage, arms folded, watching intently as the medics worked on her. No nervous jokes, no drama, no crack about health insurance. For ten long minutes he was perfectly okay with not being the center of attention—with the attention being where it should have been, on the young woman on the stretcher. When she was wheeled out, he resumed where he’d left off, and it took me awhile to realize that I could think of very few politicians who would have behaved the same way. Who didn’t need to be the focus at all times.
Here’s my guess, then, on what Obama’s talk about unity means: not that he’s a patsy who’s going to split the difference with the opposition on every issue. Instead, that he’s going to try and figure out how to run the political rapids differently, so that he avoids the obvious rocks in the water and instead find some new line through the white water. And there’s really one way to do that—try to engage far more Americans in taking part so you dilute the power of the special interests.
For instance: if you’ve got to fight for dramatic shifts in order to deal with medical insurance, you do it less by replaying the precise same battles we’ve fought for the last two decades only harder, and more by figuring out a new way in. Why do we pay twice as much for drugs as Europeans? Why do we pay half again as much for medical care without getting any healthier? These are conversations that only experts have had so far, and that kind of elite dialogue will never build the support we need for real change.
The first key is getting Americans to ask about anything. The pervasive feeling of powerlessness, born of understandable cynicism, needs to be somehow overturned. That’s one reason it’s so hopeful to see high turnout by young people in the primaries. But voting alone is insufficient. Obama spent his formative years as a community organizer, which means he knows more than most of us about how to get people feeling as if they matter. Organizing is tough work—having helped organize 2,000 demonstrations about global warming in the last year, I have some sense of just how hard. Because Americans, by long training, have become cynical about their chance of making a difference.
But organizing always works the same way. You start by making people part of the process. It’s almost the exact opposite of the me-generation personality politics so on display by the Clintons in recent weeks: the idea that they and they alone have the experience and the expertise to solve whatever problems are at hand. This is boomer egoism at its most naked, and those of us who are about Obama’s age or younger are suddenly feeling the possibility of something different for the first time in our political lives. And liking it.
No one can know how any of these people will actually govern. But I hope for a change less in tone than in form. A presidency where, great orator though he is, Obama doesn’t depend on the State of the Union talk to rally people, but instead figures out ways to use the technology of our time. Maybe for virtual hearings or informal referenda; maybe to constantly solicit ideas. And I imagine that he’d be a president in nearly constant motion, covering the country not to hold fundraisers or to meet with other pols, but to...organize. Not to say ‘here’s what I’m doing—back me up,’ but to say ‘how are we going to do this?’
I’ve kept playing that ten-minute Dartmouth interlude over in my mind, and liking Obama more and more because of it. When his supporters chant "Yes We Can," the media has tended to focus on the hopeful "yes," or the assertive "can." But I’m pretty sure the most telling word is "we."
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/3/9431/41821/720/448788Just in case you don't know who Bill is:
Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the need for more localized economies. Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history. McKibben is active in the Methodist Church, and his writing sometimes has a spiritual bent. Al Gore wrote in 2007 that "when I was serving in the Senate, Bill McKibben’s descriptions of the planetary impacts... made such an impression on me that it led, among other things, to my receiving the honorific title ‘Ozone Man’ from the first president Bush.”
McKibben grew up in suburban Lexington, Massachusetts. He was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper in college. Immediately after college he joined the The New Yorker as a staff writer, and wrote much of the Talk of the Town column from 1982 to early 1987. He quit the magazine when its longtime editor William Shawn was forced out of his job, and soon moved to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.
His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 by Random House after being serialized in the New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006.
His next book, The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment: McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable tv on the Fairfax, Virginia system (at the time among the nation's largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools, and was reissued in a new edition in 2006.
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In the spring of 2008, the Library of America will also publish "American Earth," an anthology of American environmental writing since Thoreau edited by McKibben.
He currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern and his daughter, Sophie, who was born in 1993, in Ripton, Vermont. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, where he also directs the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_McKibben
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