by David Safier
Colin Powell was less than one of my favorite people during the Bush administration — the fact is, he drove me crazy — but I never questioned his intelligence or his humanity. I was infuriated that he was weak enough to allow himself to be manipulated by the Bush administration. Over and over, they used him to justify the actions leading up to the Iraq War, since he was perceived as an honorable man, unlike, oh, say, Cheney. Or Rumsfeld. Or Bush. So untruths that came from his mouth transformed into truths, and those seeming truths sold the American people on the war.
But when he endorsed Obama, Powell was eloquent, and his words obviously came from the heart. I saw the Colin Powell who I wished I had seen years earlier, when he could have used his moral bully pulpit to help avert the Iraq disaster he helped create.
I saw that better version of the man again this morning when he was interviewed on CNN
about Obama's win. His voice was filled with emotion, and he choked up at times. He said how important it was to him that an African American was elected president, but he emphasized that Obama kept his ethnic background secondary during the campaign.
Powell called Obama "a new American President who also happens to be African American."
I wrote about
the importance of this phraseology during the primaries in April, talking about the significance of the Democratic nomination coming down to two people, one of whom was a woman and the other an African American. The English teacher in me heard echoes of Emerson's essay, "The American Scholar" where he says we separate ourselves from our connection with all of humanity by describing ourselves by our professions rather than by our human-ness. In the case of Clinton and Obama, the separateness was gender and ethnicity rather than profession, but it amounted to the same thing. If they were defined solely by these characteristics, they were separated from the humanity that flows through all of us.
I ended the post by asking,
Are we ready to see these two candidates as People first, as Emerson suggests we should? It is a genuine, and troubling question that, once this election is over, will continue to be discussed for decades.
I'm going to say, in the spirit of Hope that has come out of this election, the answer is yes. We elected Obama as the person most ready to lead the country, a person who happens to have a black father from Kenya and a white mother from the U.S. His parents are relevant, but if they were the primary considerations, Obama would not be President Elect. And I think Hillary Clinton has transcended the de-humanizing position of having the label "woman" be the primary descriptor for who she is. Now, Clinton is thought of as a formidable, capable, highly intelligent person who ran a fine campaign, then overcame her feelings of bitter disappointment to do whatever she could to help Obama win. And, yes, she's a woman, that's important too. They are both of them People first now, and we are a better nation — or maybe I should say a more evolved nation — for it.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
