When Barack Obama finally returned from his post-Presidential vacation to speak with college students in Chicago I was both wary and excited about the potential public reception. To this day, I still think he is one of the most eloquent and empathetic speakers America has elected into the White House. Although his 8 year presidency is often viewed through partisan antithetical lens, I have observed a bipartisan opinion of his rhetorical prowess.
I came across a clip that someone on my Facebook feed posted of just Obama’s opening speech. This is the only time I encountered a post about this speech on Facebook. There was a fair amount of hype on social media leading up to this event from both sides of the political coin and the subsequent silence surprised me.
The overall program was about an hour and forty five minutes long. His speech lasted about 15 minutes and the Q & A section filled the subsequent time; however, in his speech Barack Obama introduced a concept that would then continue to be reiterated throughout this event ultimately becoming one of its dominant themes. This theme aligns with what I have been working toward doing since returning from the Women’s March; working toward creating a nation united. Obama explained that his experience working in Chicago in his 20’s taught him,
“that beneath the surface differences of people that there were common hopes and common dreams and common aspirations. Common values. That stitched us together as Americans…. All [the] problems [we are currently facing] are serious. They’re daunting. But they’re not insolvable… Because of changes in the media, we now have a situation in which everybody’s listening to people who already agree with them and are further and further reinforcing their own realities to the neglect of a common reality that allows us to have a healthy debate and then try to find common ground and actually move solutions forward.”
As you can tell from my former post as well as my emphatic underlining above, I am often disheartened and frustrated by the inability of both sides to recognize the similarities they have with one another. More often than not, I am particularly frustrated with individuals who identify as progressive, liberal, or democrat. After years of name-calling and watching the Democratic president be slandered and insulted and prohibited from achieving his aim of “reaching across the aisle”, people seem to be reciprocating in kind rather than using that experience to create an empathetic conversation with the “other side”.
I continue to hear from people who I politically agree with that they have no interest in “reaching across the aisle” because “those” people “are completely irrational, dysfunctional, and condone sexism and racism” or because they are still in “shock” and “emotionally disrupted with all the abuse”.
Democrats have personally witnessed the political and emotional reactivity that can arise when confronted with a complete lack of communicative compromise, but what have we learned from it?
I get it. I felt that and sometimes I still do. But aren’t you tired of it?
Let it go. (If listening to the Disney song helps, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moSFlvxnbgk
It’s time to let go of the anger, the insults, the assumptions, the blaming, the shaming, the sense of injustice, and the sense of righteousness.
When Obama left the White House he spoke about one of the main “threat[s] to our democracy” stems from our inability to “understand democracy does not require uniformity. Our founders argued, they quarreled, and eventually they compromised. They expected us to do the same… For too many of us it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods, or on college campuses, or places of worship, or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions.”
What happened to the inspiring sentiment of Michelle Obama’s words when she said, “When they go low, we go high”?
Regardless of your political label, if you want to see a change in the political rhetoric by 2018 consider talking to “them”; you might be pleasantly surprised by the similarities “they” share with “us”.
Creating A Nation United 