Dear Baby Boomers,
The worst thing that can happen to America in 2008 is the election of John McCain as President of the United States. This is not to suggest that Senator McCain has not served this country; the man has sacrificed for this country. That was a noble sacrifice, and our nation wisely salutes him for it. Senator McCain came of age at a time when misguided members of his generation decried American soldiers and called them baby killers. They endured the fires of hell. But that war is over. That world is over.
There is a new world, one that members of a passing generation cannot comprehend. I am a citizen of a new United States, a transformed America. We are a testament to the realization of the dreams of those who struggled, to the visions of our parents, your visions. And we have struggled. We struggle to understand your earlier commitment to a government that serves and is in turn served by its people. Your commitment to equality and to protection of the most vulnerable members of our society. We struggle to understand your admonition that a society, a civilization, is measured by how it treats its poorest and its helpless.
We struggle because there was a time when you lived up to your dreams, but you stopped. You no longer live your dreams; you live our nightmare. We want to live according to our wishes. We want choices. So far, you have deprived us of choice. As you were denied that choice.
And so you have a choice. Senator McCain does have a vision, warped though it may be. A vision of one hundred years if necessary. McCain would commit not only our generations, but generations to come. And commit them to what? To war, to violence, to anarchy. This is not what Senator McCain believes, of course. He believes he can transform Iraq into the Netherlands. This vision is absurd and dangerously misguided. As I said before, the world is different than it was seven years ago. There is a curse some attribute to the Chinese: May you live in interesting times. We do live in interesting times.
Senator McCain is brash and risky, a reactionary in the truest sense of the word. A cold warrior in a world that has left the Cold War behind. He is our Putin. He would never admit this, but he sees the Middle East as a chess board. He will commit us to fighting the future, not fighting for the future. Because Senator McCain is not committed to that future. How can he be? He is committed to the past, to wars long forgotten by their combatants. And he is committed, if not to a lie, then to a deadly misrepresentation.
That misrepresentation was seeded on Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. I remember that day vividly, as do you. I remember getting breakfast in my dorm, watching CNN report on an explosion in one of the Twin Towers. At the time I did not know it was more than a fire; I was too far away from the television in the cafeteria. I finished my breakfast and returned to my dorm room. Then I learned about the planes.
The president of my university was a cold warrior as well. The previous year, he actually sent undercover officers to spy on a student socialist group. Can you imagine that? In 2000, in Michigan, a state with the highest percentage of Arabic residents, Republican university president McPherson of Michigan State University was interested in spying on socialists? But of course he was. As I said, he was a cold warrior, a seemingly moderate Republican, much like John McCain. All he could see at that time was the threat of student protests.
Maybe that was why he did not cancel classes that day, even as schools across the country closed. I had a French class that day. Yes, the dreaded French language, language of a society wise enough to avoid the rash embrace of a conflict with yet another Islamic nation. A society schooled in the dangers of colonialism, a nation that remembers Algeria. My French professor was a gentle and charismatic man from Africa. He saw us that day and even typing this is difficult, because I know what he saw in us even when we could not see it, were too shocked and too young to believe it or understand it.
He saw our fear and our shock and he led a prayer, something I could not truly appreciate at the time because I was not a believer. He saw us for what we were: terrified freshmen experiencing an event that would define their generation, even if they didn't know it then. A man from Africa with first-hand knowledge of the violence and terror of such conflicts. Maybe even a Muslim; I wouldn’t know, his prayer was really a moment of silence for the people on the ground in New York and Washington. It was prompted by a student. I barely remember her. She was tiny, I remember that. She was frightened when he called on her the first time I was in class, and her French was not particularly good, not particularly bad. This was only the third or fourth French class I had; I had transferred from another, more advanced course when I realized I could not handle the grueling work of six credits. I was new to college, I was learning. It was scary for all of us.
It was either before class had started or slightly into class when she came, in tears. She explained it to him as best she could, over sobs. Her father was in the military and sometimes worked at the Pentagon and was OKAY but she had seen the news and she was not going to be able to come to class today and just wanted him to know. Because it would count as an absence, because to President McPherson it was business as usual. Because all of us, all freshmen at a university, all separated from our families before cell phones were universal, mostly Midwesterners in this new and scary and exciting environment, well, that we might want time to absorb this didn‘t really matter to him. No, because President McPherson was a baby boomer, just like you. He assumed we would grow out of our optimism and be good worker bees after graduating; assumed that there was nothing different about how we were organizing our lives, our values. This same president would later invite none other than Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice to speak at graduation ceremonies, to protests, of course. Because by then our peers were literally dying in a war they had personally crafted. My graduating class was spared; the new president chose Maya Angelou. But the neoconservatives apparently knew better, knew what was good for us. What was good for us was forever war and forever tax cuts coupled with forever spending. Hell, we were all just being offered credit cards without understanding how credit cards worked. Why not run the nation on a credit card, payments deferred until 2020? We were invisible. We were nothing. Senator Obama has changed that.
When I graduated, Professor Folke Lindahl spoke. He called us the 9/11 graduating class. That was how he would remember us, he said. How he would always think of us. I loved Professor Lindahl. He was Swedish. He came of age when Communists and Nazis and Fascists offered promises of grand utopian societies, of grand global movements and goals. I only took one class with Professor Lindahl, a class focusing on radical challenges to liberal democracy. You know, that boring procedural liberalism, the one that offers equality of opportunity and struggles to understand its scope and the means to achieve those ends. The liberalism challenged by Marx and other egalitarians on the left. I would follow up with a class focused on Nietzsche and the challenges of the right. But Professor Lindahl’s class was the only time I took the optional honors seminar. I loved Professor Lindahl, and how could I not? The man read from my paper, offering it up as an example when he handed them back for grades.
I loved political theory. I loved learning about the best ways to handle political problems, to organize societies. I loved learning about grand visions. I loved reading Marx and Nietzsche and Aristotle and Plato and Rousseau and all the others. I loved pondering what the good life was. But I knew to be wary of grand visions. To distrust promises to radically alter the organizing principles of a society. As Isaiah Berlin once said, we have been promised many omelettes, but all we have to show for it are broken eggs. And the habit of breaking them grows. All we can be certain of is the dead and the dying, the reality of the sacrifice. Unrealized visions. Visions like the neoconservative dream of Iraq, our newest broken egg.
This is not to suggest that there is no place for vision. In 1860, the Republicans and President Lincoln had a vision. In 1932, the Democrats and President Roosevelt had a vision. But not all visions are equal. Because Stalin and Hitler had visions, as do bin Laden and Chavez. We’ve seen the high costs of misguided visions, and noble visions gone awry.
The neoconservative vision of Iraq is a noble vision gone awry. No one is content with the situation in the Middle East. And there are many Middle Eastern subjects who yearn to be citizens. We can help them, but only with the proper tools. To achieve a proper end you need the proper means, and to visualize a proper end you need proper justifications for that end.
The neoconservative vision for Iraq is noble, but its tools are vicious and wrong. They believe in no power higher than American military strength. They see our country unified not by individual freedom and liberal democracy, but by the most militant, strident nationalism imaginable. You see it in the frailty of the Republican coalition and the divisions evident in their primaries. True conservatives do believe in something higher than brute strength. In the wielding of their power, the Republicans were corrupted by it. And then they failed. They are still failing, falling into history instead of crafting it, living it. It is not enough to give lip service to your ideals, you must live them. The measures you use to achieve your ends must match the value of your ends in character. Otherwise, you will never make an omellette.
My generation is trying, you know. So is generation X, the generation many of you deemed slackers. All over the world they are trying. Some of them are putting their lives on the line in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of them are serving in the Peace Corps and Teach for America, helping the communities our country’s leaders have left behind. Others are serving in churches. Some are creative innovators, harnessing our new technology to achieve business ends that are socially responsible. They are all healing America one person at a time. They are working hard, and they are tired. They’re not perfect, they cannot achieve perfection and they know that. But they are living dreams that you helped realize. And in this they are mostly united.
We tried in 2004. God, how we tried. Record voter turnout. I was literally awake for three days campaigning for Senator Kerry. By midnight at the celebration party I was collapsing into my chair, watching the returns and realizing the inevitable. I was so exhausted that my father drove me home. My parents campaigned, too. Unfortunately, we could not break down the divisions put in place by the neoconservatives. They did their best.
But not all of you are doing your part. This letter is for you. This year, your legacy is on the line. Our future is on the line. The future of our entire world. Senator McCain represents the past, a failure of vision and a lack of imagination. He will say anything to win this race if his performance in the primaries is to be believed. I know many of you feel that Senator Clinton is abrasive and Senator Obama is untested. Senator Clinton voted for the war and that was a mistake, but do not forget how easily we were all misled by this secretive and manipulative administration. General Colin Powell was sent to the United Nations to deliver a lie, after all, and if anyone should have known better it was him. And Senator Obama understands our concerns as well as yours; he has been serving this nation for a very long time. The fact that he has only been in Washington for a few years is irrelevant. No senator has been sent to the White House since President Kennedy.
Senator Obama can bring unity to this country. He can rebuild the damage we have done abroad. He moved into politics only after serving his communities, finding faith in God and mankind along the way. To former cynics like me, he makes us believe again. He said no to the Iraq war not because he is a pacifist, but because he is principled and knowledgeable. You only go to war when you need to go to war; you do not use war and violence to achieve political ends, to implement a vision. The United States cannot police all the dictatorships in this world. Under the new conservatism, it barely has the capacity to police itself. Senator Obama knows this and has an alternative.
Senator McCain has been tested and he has failed. As a veteran of a failed war he should have known better. The Republicans do not trust Senator McCain because they cannot control him. He is brash and trigger-happy. Some of you remember the Cuban missile crisis; do you want to risk the prospect of Senator McCain handling diplomatic relations with Pakistan? Do you want to risk war with Iran? Do you want to risk another four years of steady decline in our relations not only with the Muslim world, but with our own allies? Make no mistake, Senator McCain has promised to uphold all of the policies of the Bush administration. The neoconservatives who brought us this disaster have his ear.
So, you have a choice to make this year, in the Democratic Primary and beyond. Please choose wisely. Please give us an opportunity to prove ourselves.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Citizen
