Kids, America is getting a divorce. It’s not because America doesn’t love you anymore. It’s just both of us are convinced we need to save America from financial and ideological ruin, and we’ve got two different ways of doing it. Your father wants to make you afraid of anything un-American, of Muslims and social programs like highways and the Post Office, of an effective and competent leadership, scaring you into submission. Your father thinks you aren’t going to do any better than this, and he wants you to believe this too, so you’ll never strive for anything greater than mediocrity. Your mother though, you know how much she loves you, right? She looks down at you and sees potential. She sees what you are capable of, and it makes her proud. She has seen you at your best moments, when you wrote the Bill Of Rights and risked your lives carrying each other out of the World Trade Center on September 11th. She loves you equally, but uniquely, and she judges your worth not on your wealth or class, but on your capabilities and the content of your character.
Your father wants you to think this is a bad thing, but he is too much of a coward to say so to your face. Instead, he chooses to associate your mother with real problems, things like terrorism and unemployment. It hurts your mother to hear these things. It pains her to hear the word liberal shoved into such inappropriate context. It pains her that so many people in America hear about Barack Obama being “the most liberal senator” and perceive that to be a bad thing. It makes her wonder how some of her children became so against the same way of thinking that gives them a minimum wage and safety and security when they retire. Surely, these kids, who are not bad kids, need to learn why they are acting against their best interests.
If there is one thing you need to know about your father, it’s that his biggest problem is that he never listens. While he deadens the airwaves with inane talking points and fear-mongering, you need to know that your mother has been looking out for you since before you were born, since the first Pilgrims came from Europe to avoid religious persecution. You need to know that ever since then, she has been the one dragging your father forward, however slowly, despite his constant complaints the whole way. What she always knew, and now wants you to know, is that every advancement in society, in technology, in political policy, in ideology, is rooted in progressive, liberal thinking. that there is no such thing as a conservative advancement, that advancement is dialectally opposed to Daddy’s way of thinking. His is the philosophy of “good enough” and “why fix what ain’t broke” that becomes especially irrelevant in a society where the kitchen light is shot, the microwave doesn’t work, and her children’s lives, both socially and financially, are simply not good enough.
She needs you to know how hard she has tried to keep you free, truly free. She has fought so many battles against your father, some you heard seeping through the bedroom door, and some you never knew. She fought with him to end the abhorrent practice of slavery, she fought with him for women to gain the right to vote and decide their own destinies, she fought with him to squelch the oozing remnants of racism during the civil rights movement and she continues to fight with him about it to this day. She fights with him for safe and legal abortion for any who choose to have it. She fights with him for homosexuality to be known not as a choice or a mental illness, but a circumstance of birth that should have no bearing on one’s right to fall in love and raise a family. She fights with him to keep our church and our state at an arm’s length, barricading schools when he tries to ram Creationism and other vulgar myths into her children’s minds. She fights with him to allow all her children to make choices over what substance goes or does not go into their own body, even if it hurts them, so long as it causes no physical pain to others. She fights with him to end useless war, the destructive and invasive nation-building that has ended so many other empires of the past. She fights with him for speech and press because she believes in her children’s ability to speak intelligently and truthfully. She has fought tirelessly and without a single complaint, because she wants what’s best for you kids, she really, truly does.
And for every battle she wins, every right she proudly yet silently hands to her children, there are still some who would call her a bitch, an enemy of the House and state, an anti-American, a barbarian Communist and a heretic against God. There are still some that are drawn to their father’s gimmickry, his three hundred dollar checks and lollypops and trips to the firing range on Saturdays. These few have always been there, but now she is beginning to see that there are more now than ever before, and they are louder, more persistent in their quest to hand over every privilege and responsibility she has given them. It has been too long of a battle for her to win back her home for her children, and she is beginning to see there is no end in sight, that maybe it’s time for her to leave, and start her life over. Your father’s children are kicking and screaming and clawing their way back to infancy, before privileges and responsibility, because it was easier then. It was easier before you all developed a conscience and a sense of decency, when Daddy could give you a bedtime, tuck you under the blankets, and watch you fall asleep to his stories of the American Dream.
But you are older now, and Mommy sees that. You aren’t as naive as Daddy thinks you are, and you can take care of yourselves. Your mother has worked her whole life for the day when you can move out on your own, but for some strange reason, your father’s children want to undo everything she has done for all of you. They march backwards into his study, into the allegory of the cave. They sit down on his sofa and fasten their chains. They smile at the pictures he hangs on the wall, the portraits of materialism and short-term greed, the dancing images of his sports cars and penthouses, things they could never afford, cascaded shrines to his own self-interest. They vote not with their heart, or their head, but with their ears and eyes, looking for what looks and sounds pretty, and not for what rings just and true. They tagged along with your father voted for Reagan and his wasteful war on drugs, they tagged along again and voted for Bush I and II and their egregious wars on Iraq, and they will tag along to vote for John Mccain and Sarah Palin and their appalling and unprecedented war on intellectualism and rationality. They will vote against the America, the home your mother worked overtime to fill with beautiful, real things, furnishings of progress and brave ideas, of those elegant, unobtainable vagaries of prosperity and hope. They will gleefully hand themselves over to their father’s will, so Daddy’s rich white friends from across the street can have their chance to play God and tarnish her chidren’s future in the name of seven figure salaries. And she’s not sure what they’re after, whether there is hate in their hearts or just ignorance, and she’s not sure what makes them do the things they do. It frightens her. It makes the pit in her stomach tense up. It keeps her glued to Fox News, so she can put a name and a face to her fear, so she can listen to her children call the best Presidential candidate since FDR dangerous, dishonorable, even terrorist, stopping just short of nigger, and then herself an anti-American for supporting him. Again. Again. Again.
Has all her struggle been in vain? Can she salvage a home out of this house?
Mommy’s at the end of her sanity. She keeps fighting for truth and freedom for everyone, even when her children’s actions imply they deserve neither. She campaigns for ideas that for all intents and purposes should be obvious and inherent- why must poverty exist? suffering? unhappiness? discontent?- and her husband and his children mock her pursuits, calling such dreams to be naive, infeasible. She has taken the abuse sitting down, but no longer. She has seen her husband for who he truly is, and it disgusts her. She knows now the depth of his campaign against humanity. Every crime he has committed and shifted blame to God, to nature, to his children, every attempt to prey on your fear and miseducation of Islam, every attempt to stir up ancestral relics of your racist past, every attempt to discredit the disenfranchised, every attempt to push your civil rights in the gutter, every promise of putting country first while spending years away from home at war overseas, every attempt to strip liberalism of its rightful sense of dignity, honor, and pride, every bit of sloganeering, every scandal and lie, she knows them all now. Your father has irrevocably poisoned and weakened this nation, and she has finally had enough and she is leaving.
But she has one final plea, a choice, if you will. Despite your father’s actions, this nation is not beyond repair. But it is going to take a lot of work. Do you wish to continue to listen to your father and define your humanity by the lowest dredges of your conscience, your reprehensibles, your ills? Do you continue to let old men tell you what you can and cannot do? Who can and cannot be saved? It is in your hands now, as men, as women, as members of the American family. Because you are all Americans- beyond the partisan politics and media buzzwords, you are Americans at the core, and the future of this country is in all of your best interests. It is in your best interest to strive for perfection, to be dissatisfied with adequacy, to reach for greatness and justice in their purest forms. And your mother knows you can do it. She has tremendous faith in your ability to do the right thing. Just be ever weary, for there is no easy solution. Barack Obama is not the answer. While an excellent Presidential candidate, he is no more than one man. Mommy is not the answer, either. She’s not getting any younger, you see, and one day, someday soon, she’ll be gone. You, her children, are the answer. You must grow up and save this family, because this country needs to be saved, and you, the young, the liberal, the learned, the passionate of spirit and heart, have the ability to save it.
Vote Barack Obama tomorrow, and then spend the next four years ensuring he stay true to his word. Go on. Make me proud.
