It's been lovely, hitting my stride in my mid forties, to see a guy my age elected to the White House. I was involved in grassroots politics back in the mid 80's, working on the east coast, and doing similar work as Barack Obama, that being low level community organizing for worker's rights and progressive social change. It was bleek. Barak might have had the audacity of hope, but I can't say that I did. I think I earned around five or six thousand dollars a year, we were in the midst of trickle-down mania, and again, the unemployment rate was towering. Going in to the Peace Corps was a step up on my career ladder. I went to Africa looking forward to the job security of two years of volunteer work.
Now that Obama has become president, I think that our generation can claim some momentum, a coming of age for a generation of post-boomers, and use this opportunity to recapture much of the cultural verbage of our political times.
For instance, what actually is a fiscal conservative? Is the word "conservative" supposed to imply some kind of prudence? Wouldn't that notion be completely laughable at this point? After we've seen increasingly ruinous policies from the Republicans for the majority of the past thirty years? Our country is on the ropes, no-bid contracts to Cheney's Halliburton Corporation are still hemorrhaging our future billion after billion, meanwhile the subject of "weapons of mass destruction" as the urgent cause of this war has long since been forgotten, and our entire economic future as a people is now at stake. It's a set of economic consequences that fit perfectly into Osama bin Laden's plan for our future.
All of this the uncontested cause-and-effect of three branches of government being for most of eight years under complete Republican control.
What are family values? Should we ask Mark Foley or Larry Craig, two of the most vocal (weren't they both publicly anti-gay?) "family values" proponents of the conservative cause? And what about the conservative prosecutors of Bill Clinton that dragged his torrid sexual details through the primetime television news lineup, month after titillating month, parading a semen stained dress as the all-consuming life-or-death legislative matter of the day? Will our generation ever forget?
And what does it mean to be pro-life? Does that mean wipe out any doctors that provide abortions? Like abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, who was assassinated in his church by a pro-life activist? Is it just a coincidence that so many pro-life conservatives are the same people who needed to go and attack "those people over there" after 9/11, never mind who might actually be the target of our retaliatory bombing?
It belongs to the people of my generation, of Barack Obama's generation, to recognize and sort out these damaging and dangerous hypocrisies, and to reclaim the basic language of politics, society and truth.
What if "Pro-Life" meant the moral opposition to killing? No more capital punishment, no more state sanctioned military aggression, foreign or domestic, no more killing, as in: no more killing.
After all, the pro-life stance is a naturally pacifist stance, and it's one that should rightfully belong to the peace movement. The same peace movement that demographically tends to honor a woman's right to govern her own body, since that too, is the natural pro-life position. Not only is it natural to support life itself, in children and grown ups too, but it's natural to support a person's right to live that life as well, while enjoying personal liberty.
A generation of Americans my age are ready to take ownership of the world that is rightfully ours. We elected the first Black president of the United States, we saw an end to apartheid in South Africa, and we saw the peaceful dismantling of the Berlin Wall. Since Obama's election, Japan has elected one of the first progressive presidents in many decades. Is there a connection? What if the "New World Order" predicted by the right wing in the eighties and nineties turned out to be a broad blossoming of progressive ideals that we have waited for all of our adult lives?
We are a positive and hopeful generation, ready to see the environmental movement settle into it's rightful place in the modern collective consciousness, and ready to manifest the changes that we've spent our lives fighting for.
The language of our society will be retooled by our generation. The public is awakening to the deception and failure of long time conservative rule, and its accompanying rhetoric, and the left will recapture the honest essence of what some of these words and phrases really mean. Comedy and pop-culture are evidence of such a shift, today. The methods and verbage of the right-wing are losing, their language is exhausted.
I'm a pro-lifer. Because I support a woman's right to govern her own body, and because I believe that state sanctioned killing, through the judicial system or through war, is wrong.
Yup, I'm pro-life, and I vote.
