Barack Obama and Harold Washington

'Harold's presence consoled, as Will's Jesus consoled, as Rafiq's nationalism consoled. But beneath the radiance of Harold's victory in Altgeld and elsewhere, nothing seemed to change' (231).

'i wonder whether, away from the spotlight, Harold thought about these constraints. Whether, like Mr Anderson or Mrs Reece or any number of other black officials who now administered over inner city life, he felt as trapped as those he served, an inheritor of sad history

Just reading Obama's memoir. It's amazing. I can't believe he's the President. Just a shame he now has to ok US military ambitions like missiles into Pakistan and Afghanistan (with the right hand he closes Gitmo Bay and with the left hand he orders missiles which kill 22civilians - clever politics really). The guy has had an amazing relatively traveled life. And he writes so well. Like an anthropologist on his own family life... The point i want to make in relation to capitalism is basically that Michael Moore had it all right in 'StupidWhite Men', White people have seriously screwed up the world and we should run from them in street. The treatment of Black Americans (and substitute any ethnic indigenous/slaves in here) is so incredibly dehumanizing that if i ever here another white person complain about Blacks not pulling themselves up and taking responsibility i think i'll turn violent. Obama doesn't agree with me, he thinks they need to take some responsibility for the state of things... No amount of responsibility will change 1) the internalization of pain/slave mentality from years of brutalization (and related) 2) the structures in which black people are predetermined to fail. For example, if you give two similar IQ tests to a Black person and tell them one is an IQtest and the other one is not, they will score so much lower than the one they think is the IQ test even though the tests are the same. What could become one of the most tragic things about his Presidency is that Obama spends much time in his book talking about the success of Harold Washington, the first Black Mayor of Chicago and how that success was incredible but that it did not reflect the day to day racism and situation of Black Americans. Obama is almost certainly going to become the Harold Washington he discusses in his memoir. Which is in itself an amazing narrative on history/destiny. (to be fair i haven't finished it so i could be talking crap). But that is what i see now, Barack's fears about Harold Washington are the very same ones he is now playing out...
Not that Obama's achievement isn't historically incredible (and improbable) . It's just that from reading his book, you (I) get the impression that the injustice is so deep, the structures so well in place and so well protected, that no amount of figure heads will change the fact that Barack was still the only Black senator when he ran...(i think...) It's great he has written this memoir well before his political career took off, he writes openly about his life. A truly captivating story.

Good and Evil

I just finished watching Shake Hands with the Devil, the documentary about Canadian Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire who led the UN peace mission in Rwanda throughout the 1994 genocide. A friend had mentioned that what impacted her about Dallaire's reflection on the genocide was Dallaire's comments that when he shock hands with the Hutu extremists he saw no humanity in their eyes. He felt he was shaking hands with the devil, in both an immediate sense and a broader metaphysical/metaphorical sense. Later in the film, Dallaire mentions that while in his office one night during the genocide he felt something come through the window and settle in the room. A presence which gave him strength to carry on, to continue the mission, to hope. Dallaire's evaluation of these experiences was that in the face of unspeakable, unimaginable force of evil, there must be (and for him there was) a force of (for) the purist good.

I find this moral dualism relatively easy to relate to. The idea that there are both good and evil forces in the world, both working in different ways, is a very Christian idea. However, these forces are not presented as equal within Christianity, and in my understanding, evil itself is not really personified, it is a state of chaos and destruction, but is ultimately subservient to God and his plan for the world to be united back to him. All this is very well, yet i struggle with the idea so much. The very reasons i feel convinced that there is a good God out there somewhere who does want good things for us all can easily be inverted to demonstrate maybe the God that is up there is a malicious God, revealing in humanity's chaos and suffering. Or, more likely, no theistic type of God at all. For all the demonstrable evidence about the lack of God's intervention in world (see: humanity; history), i still found Dallaire's experience harrowing, hopeful and honest. And, at times, I can't help but feel the same way as Dallaire. The capacity for human grace and hope is unfathomable, and yet, as Hannah Arendt has discussed, evil can be so banal, that each of us holds the capacity for unimaginable evil. Are we, then, split? Concepts of sin/brokenness etc all point to something around this idea. But i don't think explain it completely. The capacity to sin/or sin itself is not, at least in my mind, the same as this sense of evil, which is different from a lie, from a broken promise, from a vengeful comment, from a lustful thought, from a hateful thought. (Or is it?) Are we just animals, killing each other in our own ways (colonisation, politics, religion, power)? Why do I not feel completely satisfied with these naturalist/humanist explanations, as convinced as I am of them?

"We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice", said Martin Luther King Jr. during his speech on Vietnam in 1968. This makes my bones shiver, and my heart fill. All my education and deconstruction of how constructed my reality is, my thoughts which create the universe, all compete for hold over my convictions when i feel stirred like this.