For me, one of Dr. King's most memorable quotes is this:
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
And while it would be overly romantic to assume that one Presidential candidate is able to act purely out of love and one candidate is only able to act out of hate, it does provide a good lens for examining a key difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
In today's NY Times, Maureen Dowd has an editorial entitled Darkness and Light, in which she opens with the following statement:
Hillary Clinton denounced Dick Cheney as Darth Vader, but she did
not absorb the ultimate lesson of the destructive vice president:
Don’t become so paranoid that you let yourself be overwhelmed by a dark vision.
I fear that is what has happened to Hillary Clinton. And, I confess that I was part of the attack machine, at least early on, that helped fuel the animosity toward her. In 1994, every Republican challenger campaign had something negative - TV commercial, direct mail piece, push poll question - to say about then First Lady Hillary Clinton and her health care proposal. I helped write some of that media. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be Clinton and sustain such a long spate of personal and downright nasty attacks.
But, it seems to me that the call on each of us, and for Christians in particular, is to absorb the hate and transform it with love. Further, it seems to me that Hillary Clinton has, instead, transformed her hate into more hate, and allowed that to determine her political style. In this sense, her response to personal attacks shares much with our national response to the attacks of September 11th.
At that time, we were attacked without provocation and believed, rightly or wrongly, that it was particularly unjust given America's desire to help the world. Much of that thinking was rooted more in the post-World War II era, and was not necessarily reflective of America post-Vietnam. But September 11th was, nonetheless, an undeserved and quite personal attack, and worthy of our outrage and anger.
We then had the choice of how to react. As I have written a number of times, in our response to the terrorist attacks on DC, NY and Pennsylvania, the way of peace and reconciliation was not tried and found wanting, it was found difficult and untried. There were ample voices at the time, including my own, who found the invasion of Iraq a rush to judgment, an admission of failure and a statement of the power of fear to overcome the best in each of us. And yet fear was so deeply embedded into our body politic that we seemed to attack instinctively.
We now stand at the precipice of a new era. The Cold War is over. Decades of American corporate and consumer dominance are being threatened by unparalleled national debt. New information technologies allow each of us to be aware of global injustice, and the role American overconsumption plays in that injustice. All of these changes have occurred during the last 28 years. Amazing.
It is time for a new political dynamic to take hold of our nation. As Einstein once famously quipped, “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them." The Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era of brought us the perception of wealth while adding more than $8 trillion in national debt. The Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era brought us into a global information exchange, only to discover that many in the world resent our excess. And, the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era created a toxic climate of "gotcha" politics that we cannot sustain; we are politicking ourselves into our own destruction.
Sadly, Hillary Clinton seems to be a product of this era of hate and division. As Dowd points out in her editorial, she seems to be unable to respond to a political challenge with anything but anger and accusations. She has become like her attackers.
That is why I have found Barack Obama to be so engaging. He has shown grace under fire, and courage in the face of increasingly nasty and, dare I say, Rovean, tactics employed against him by both Hillary and Bill Clinton. He much more closely embodies what I want to be true of myself, our nation and her leaders.
So, I am asking you to join me in hoping for a new political dynamic. I am asking you to believe that a new era is possible, that engagement matters, that reconciliation is politically viable and that responsibility for our words and actions can once again be a governing principle for our nation. I am asking you to support, or to continue to support, Barack Obama.
A Great Introduction to the Emergent Church
I have this dream that one day, when my PhD is done, I will find time to do the fun things in life I have put off. And one of those things will be fly fishing, one of the best ways I can think of to spend a day.
