blog - gObama 2008
South Central is keepin it real
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
(10 a.m. - local time, Los Angeles, California)
Sometimes airport lounges harbor culinary surprises. I found a Mexican joint that makes excellent breakfast burritos on terminal 5 before taking off to Honolulu.
My fear about a prolonged airport security check was unfounded. I passed the gate without any extra screening this time. Maybe Honolulu has not a strategic importance in the war on terror or I could pass as a local face. It feels nice not to be picked and questioned but rather eat a burrito filled with egg, cheese and beef.
Yesterday, was an excellent swipe through some of the local voices in South Central and I am particularly happy with the voices and statements of black men on camera.
I bumped into a community organizer (picture) who supports Barack from his days back in Chicago and who left me with a feeling that Obama is indeed supported by a large percentage of Afro-American man. Maybe I am just talking to people who want to say good things about him.
Finally, at 9.30 p.m. in a Starbucks coffee shop I bumped into a brother who is not fond of Barack Obama at all. I asked him to give me an interview once I return from Hawaii to explain his critical points in depth.
I am making progress and have the feeling for the first time that I will paint a picture that goes beyond another Obama endorsement. After all I am not American and the election 2008 does not depend on my promotional efforts.
I feel personally though that talking to people here has grounded me in my enthusiasm for the campaign and brought a deeper understanding where American consumer idealism fails to inspire me. Having grown up to be grown-up - to play the game of education, career, house and home -- has left limited choices for a large majority of the population. These people work very hard to keep up payments on their mortgage and credit cards. They are simply too tired to read or engage in any of Obama's ideas on politics. Who can blame them after the daily onslaught of commercials and jingles for products on radio and TV.
It seems that politics and ideas are like a portion extra fries or refills from done deals that have been made long in the past. Status quo is super-size me and it will work.
My skeptical Eastern idealism has been squashed by the realities of a dysfunctional family unit and my own self-sabotage as a black man. When it comes to getting married, growing up and buying a house, even making a career (and being an aging baby boomer from the East who does not believe in the system) does not seem like a good solution any longer.
Although I never had an American dream, my mother and father once believed “another world was possible” their life’s are painful reminders, how naive youthful idealism can be squashed by the realities of post-socialist/capitalist survival in times of globalization.
How to survive as a son of parents with utopian dreams? I admit I don't want to get a nine-to-five. No, I do not need to hear about a $10.000 credit to buy your special sales offer before it expires. Does this make me different from millions of consumers that believe in the dream?
Probably not, but as I remember seeing a slogan at Los Angeles airport before departure: “Do what you want, not what you can.”
I agree with those marketeers, I will save that sales offer for later. And there are a lot of smart people thinking about things like: How we stay good? by Jeffry Kluger in Time magazine from 3 rd of December 2007:
Merely being equipped with moral programming does not mean we practice moral behavior. Something still has to boot up that software and configure it properly, and that something is community. Hauser believes that all of us carry what he calls a sense of moral grammar - the ethical equivalent of the basic grasp of speech that most linguists believe is with us from birth. But just as a syntax is nothing until words are built on it, so too is a sense of right and wrong useless until someone teaches you how to apply it. Its the people around us who do that teaching - often quite well.
There lies the paradox and tragedy of our species that lives in a fractured world of global opposites. Obama is a master storyteller that taps into the code of moral programming and can resolve the inner conflict that America carries within itself and cyclically exports. The symptoms are numerous: unjust wars and anti-terror laws in the name of democracy that are rejected by autocrats in the rest of the world.
If Obama can pacify the overseer mentality of the American foreign policy, he will mark a paradigm shift in cultural re-programming. However, he may fix the bug only until a new error shows up - if he is elected president.
The American community functions as the source code - the media as the script language. Grass-roots support must ask the question of world citizenship - a source code that needs to be re-programmed. A quick bug fix for 4 years of legislation may not be enough for the rest of the worlds needs.
My twisted Afro-pean self remains alert but passive and I am hesitant to embrace the “audacity of hope” that killed our poets. Niggers are scared of revolution...(Last Poets)