Democracy for Vancouver

I went to lunch with a friend last week, and was arguing with him about his refusal to even discuss the November election with his wife, a Republican: “She can make up her own mind.”

P. says J. was really upset by the Palin pick, as J. is pro-choice (?McCain!) and thinks Palin is completely unqualified. But he doesn’t know if J. can bring herself to vote for Obama, and won’t ask, even though they have two young daughters.

But when it got down to it, P.’s position was this: Maybe this country needs to go through a McCain and whatever fresh hells may follow to get our head out of our collective ass. And yes, says P., he’s willing to let his daughters suffer through that, because he thinks there is no other way to make Americans grow up and make their government what it should be. (P. is originally from Scandinavia and only became a U.S. citizen within the last few years, so he has a good idea of what a functioning First World democracy can look like.)

Fast forward to this weekend, when I was paired up with R. to canvass my neighborhood for the Million Doors for Peace project. R. is a Nader voter, and believes a vote for the lessor of two evils is evil itself. If I don’t believe Barack Obama is a truly progressive candidate, how can I vote for him? If we don’t vote for the candidate we believe in 100%, we will never get the kind of democracy we need, says R. So damn the consequences, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between McCain and Obama anyway.

Then, after we parted ways on Saturday, R. emailed me to thank me for disillusioning him. If I could agree with everything he said and still vote for Obama, then there really was nothing he could do to change anything.

I am not a political innocent, and as I said wayyyy back before the primaries ended and Edwards sullied himself so completely, Obama’s fervent anti-partisanism gives me little room for hope.

But what room there is I have to live in, not only because I have a ten-year-old son, but because accepting, pessimistically, the enormous flaws of our semi-democratic system is just too depressing. I can’t leave it be and accept what comes if I think I have the slightest chance of making things better.

Maybe that’s megalomania on my part, thinking that this blog and the Million Doors for Peace and the MoveOn bakesales and bakesales for New Orleans can make a difference. But to give up is to accept that this is the best we can do, and I simply don’t believe it. If I, raised in the South by Republican parents in a bigoted and stratified community, can wind up a compassionate, egalitarian progressive, then why can’t a majority of Americans?

I believe that my son’s generation, which sees no color and has no problem with homosexuality and believes earnestly in in economic justice, may be the ones to get us there. And I will not give up so long as that possibility is alive.

Obama is not our savior; we have to take on that role for ourselves. As FDR said, it is our job to make the President do what is right. Perhaps the current financial crisis will bring back the activism of the 1930s, and we will be able to make this country what it can be before my son has his own children.

So long as there is that possibility, I will fight on.