Responsibility

I am heartened by the outcome of our recent election. Not because of the Obama victory, though that is, I believe, a good thing. Not, in fact, because of the overwhelming landslide that carried Mark Warner into office, even though that restored my faith in the Virginia electorate. It was not even Virginia’s return to the Democratic fold that prompted my restored feelings of optimism, although that was long overdue. No. My uplifted emotional state is due to the return of responsibility.

Perhaps it is just me (and those of you who know me know that that prefix statement REALLY means that I don’t think it is) but there has seemed to be a slow and steady decline in any feeling of responsibility in any number of fields over the past twenty years. From students who were willing to blame everyone and everything but themselves for their failures to salespeople who met complaints with a smile and an indifferent shrug, America has been suffering from a severe case of not-my-fault-ism and unwillingness to expend even the slightest energy toward righting wrongs.

Since I seem to have an overdeveloped sense of guilt and/or responsibility (vestiges of my Roman Catholic upbringing) I have been exceedingly frustrated and disturbed by this trend, and have been only too willing to work overtime at assigning blame. I have run through the usual suspects over the years, with my villains running the gamut from too much TV, to not enough supervision, to parents more interested in money than kids, to lack of community due to air-conditioning and garage-door openers (don’t get me started—I’m not always rational)..to just plain laziness. I had stopped short of government, but then along came George Bush, who has proved a convenient and likely scapegoat for just about everything else, so why not pile on?

This presidential campaign exacerbated every scrape and scratch on my bruised and battered sense of what’s right and wrong. So much of what went on in speeches and campaign ads and even in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms (which now seem to hold only pundits and talking heads and their laptops) just seemed to be so…unworthy of our political process. While it was abundantly clear that the road across America was littered with policies and programs and industries that were seriously broken, debate centered around personal attacks and misrepresentations (on both sides) of what the other candidate stood for. Never before had I witnessed such a crying need for critical thinking skills among the electorate, skills that would allow voters to tease out the truth from statements that went wholeheartedly for the biased interpretation of just about everything.

Capping this assault on my own good sense and that of the American voter was the selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Instead of being greeted by a rousing country-wide tsunami-like bellow of “John McCain, what are you THINKING??”, this announcement apparently generated enthusiasm for the Republican ticket.
Now, in the interest of perfect honesty here, I will say that I could have voted for John McCain up to that point. He seemed to be a reasonable man, with policies as reasonable as much of his competition for the nomination. But someone somewhere at the Republican convention must have slipped something into his drink, hypnotized him into some sort of weird political trance, changed his reading glasses, or erased his conscious memory in some way…did the Vietnamese ever watch The Manchurian Candidate?...and he walked out on stage apparently convinced that Sarah Palin was the answer to the American voter’s prayers. I guess that assumes that we were all praying for Caribou Barbie, a woman as insular as they come, whose convictions vary with her location and current ambition, and whose inability to utter a complete and cogent sentence boggles the mind. Had John McCain teamed up with just about anyone short of the anti-Christ, he might have done better in my book. Unfortunately for him, the best speech I heard him make, the most heartfelt and honest look at the mind of John McCain, was his concession speech. Had he spoken that well from the beginning, had he ignored his handlers, had he run from his own heart, he might have been president today.

Which (sort of) brings me back to my initial statement. Responsibility is that quality that people hunger for. We want someone who will deal with us and the issues from a position of honesty and candor. We don’t necessarily want someone who will tell us it’s all right, or who will trumpet “Mission accomplished!” when it’s not. We want someone whom we feel we can trust, and that someone has to be a responsible individual: one who demonstrates-- and brings out in us-- our best qualities and our highest levels of patriotism.

I don’t know that Barack Obama has better answers for the problems that beset us. I don’t know if he can fix what’s broken. In fact, I’m pretty sure he can’t. One man, even with a Democratic majority in Congress, can only do so much, and we are in pretty bad straits. However, I know how he makes me feel, how he makes other people feel, how he makes the country and the world feel. He makes us feel that we are not going to be victims anymore, but will be active participants in rebuilding our own corner of the world, and our reputation in the farther reaches of it. He is treating us as the responsible people we can and should be, and once were. He expects us all to be more than we are, and he’s allowed us to dream again of what we could be.

I hope that none of us is disappointed.