Tinerii, forta motrice pentru speranta, incredere si entuziasm

De obicei nu asez articolele aparute in presa lumii in jurnalul propriu-zis, ci la rubrica “Atitudini”, considerand ca ceea ce cred eu ca merita citit nu este intotdeauna si parerea mea despre subiectul in cauza.

Astazi, insa, voi face o exceptie. International Herald Tribune a publicat articolul dlui Roger Cohen, intitulat “Tinerii, forta motrice a miscarii lui Obama”. Nu doresc sa aduc, prin publicarea pe blog a articolului, nici o nota de partinire, nici in campul democrat al candidatilor la presedintia SUA, nici in cel republican. Pozitia in care ma aflu nu imi permite acest lucru.

Insa, ceea ce articolul subliniaza are o importanta mult mai mare decat candidatul la care se refera. Este ideea ca forta care proiecteaza personalitatea in prima linie a leadership-ului lumii de astazi nu mai este alternanta intre dreapta si stanga, intre negru si alb, intre bun si rau, intre regiuni, intre religii, intre tanar si batran sau intre femei si barbati. Ceea ce conteaza in alegerea libera de astazi este intre trecut si viitor. Si acest adevar ne atinge in mare masura si pe noi, romanii.

Articolul mai aduce in discutie speranta, ca energie absolut necesara progresului, despre vechi si nou, despre entuziasm si despre incredere. Este un text care merita citit cu ochii indreptati spre realitatea romaneasca din prezentul imediat.

Obama’s youth-driven movement
by Roger Cohen

International Herald Tribune, January 28, 2008

GREELEYVILLE, South Carolina: Something is going on in America. Even in this depressed corner of the country, a place where trains no longer stop and poor families get water from shallow wells, you feel it. A political campaign has become a movement with Barack Obama at its head.

Campaigns are planned, but movements are full of impromptu decisions like the one that delivered Bryant Jones, 25, to this backwater. A few days ago, Jones, who is white and has always leaned Republican, jumped in his car and drove seven hours from Washington to campaign for Obama, a black Democrat.

“It was his all-encompassing message that got to me,” Jones, a student at George Washington University said. “I feel uplifted by him.”

Obama swept to victory in South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary, taking 55 percent of the vote, more than double Hillary Clinton’s score. He did so with over 80 percent of the black vote in a heavily African-American state with a charged racial history, and about a quarter of the white vote.

Those are the raw numbers. They are heartening to Obama, who has the wind at his back, but the Clinton campaign is looking to contests in states with different social make-ups. Did Clinton take a bullet in South Carolina in order to racialize her fight with Obama going into Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, when 22 states hold nominating contests?

Certainly, Bill Clinton lost no opportunity to inject race, alluding to Jesse Jackson’s victories here in the 1984 and 1988 Democratic primaries, as if to minimize the significance of Obama’s win and clothe him in Jackson’s marginal mantle. Candidates, he said earlier, were getting votes “because of their race or gender,” suggesting black-versus-white might be his wife’s undoing.

Obama, in victory, took a different tack. “The choice in this election is not between regions or religions or genders. It’s not about rich versus poor, young versus old, and it’s not about black versus white. This election is about the past versus the future.”

The lines reprised the unifying theme of Obama’s breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention while adding a note that has been critical to his youth-driven momentum: ending a Clinton-symbolized status quo.

Certainly, the lure of a different future drew Jones, the young independent with Republican sympathies who is now wearing Obama buttons.

Jones is from Idaho. He made clear he’d voted for Bush at least once. But he’s now had it with “my-way-or-the-highway politics” and with the same old faces.

“I’m 25 and for my entire life a Bush or a Clinton has been in the executive office, either as vice-president or president” he said. “The United States is not about dynasties. That’s one reason we fought a revolutionary war.”

He’s drawn to Obama’s environmental proposals, his honesty, and what he called “the fact he symbolizes for me that we are at a point where we do not have to think about skin color.” Other Idaho Republican friends were also leaning toward Obama, Jones said.

This young man represents something important. A new generation – for whom race is an issue overcome, and baby-boomers are old folk fighting arcane battles, and post-9/11 thinking must cede to post-post-9/11 creativity – is hungry for hope and willing to come even to places as hopeless as Greeleyville to demonstrate their longing.

Obama rightly mocks those who dismiss him as a naïve “hopemonger” and say he has to be “seasoned” in order to “boil all the hope out of him.” This war-stretched, recession-menaced country is confronted by “the fierce urgency of now,” as Martin Luther King once put it. An Idaho-raised, Republican-leaning white kid feels that urgency and makes a political leap; so do myriad others.

In a makeshift Obama campaign center in Greeleyville, I also stumbled on seven Harvard students who’d driven for 16 hours to get out the vote for their post-baby-boom candidate. “I’m here because I believe Obama has a chance at greatness,” said Kishore Kuchibhotla, 27, who’s studying for a biophysics doctorate.

Hannah Fried, 26, a law student, said: “Clinton is what our country has been. She’s not where we’re going, which is more diverse, more global, with fewer expectations about what it means to be black or white. Obama gets this from his upbringing, which meant he could never have a narrow perspective.”

When campaigns become movements, barriers dissolve. Crumbling Greeleyville has surely never before seen seven Harvard students being offered fried pig skins before going to canvass in African-American homes without running water.

This little town suggests Obama has indeed assembled “the most diverse coalition of Americans we’ve seen in a long, long time,” as he put it. If that coalition is beyond race, as I believe, rather than vulnerable to race, as Bill Clinton seems to have bet, South Carolina may prove no aberration.

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