Friday, January 30, 2009

Putting Away Childish Things

For years now my friend the political activist has been telling me stories like this: President Bush comes to town and my buddy and some people he knows put together a protest.  They go down to the motorcade route or the building where Mr. Bush will speak, wanting to hold up signs and chant anti-torture slogans and let people know what they think.  It’s an exercise of free speech, a form of democratic expression guaranteed to us in the Bill of Rights.

Routinely, though, the police herd them off to a restricted protest area where nobody from the president’s team will ever have to see them.  If the protestors refuse to go to the distant, restricted protest pen, they get arrested.  Those who carry signs in support of the president, however, might be allowed to stand along the motorcade route or attend the president’s speech.  In America, all political expressions are equal, but some are apparently more equal than others.

I remembered those throttled protests last week as I stood in the back of a large, crowded meeting room watching the inauguration on TV. There was President Obama delivering an elegant, point by point repudiation of major Bush policies, and now Mr. Bush sitting a couple of rows back was forced to listen as his legacy was rhetorically dismantled. For a second I thought it might have been bad manners for the new president to criticize his predecessor in front of a million or two Americans right there on the National Mall.

But that’s the problem with growing up here in the Midwest.  We don’t want to attract attention; we don’t want to cause a scene.  When it comes right down to it, most of us would rather not exercise our free speech rights if it means doing something noisy and provocative, like making plain our disapproval of a president’s actions. For that matter, many of us Midwesterners probably wish we could ignore what our leader has been doing or where the world is headed. One of Mr. Bush’s talents, it appears, was helping us do just that.

President Obama has different skills. When he quoted the Bible and spoke of putting away childish things, he was no longer dressing down Mr. Bush.  He had by then turned his attention to his audience, the American people. You and me, the folks listening to the radio in Elkhart and South Bend and small-town Michigan and Indiana, we’re the ones he was addressing. He was telling us to put away the things of a child, to get our acts together and start behaving like adults.

Adults – people who can take a sharp, reflective look at this troubled world, people who can see beyond their own narrow self-interest, people who can get a tough job done. Where Mr. Bush might calm us and rock us to sleep, Mr. Obama poked and provoked and called us to task. His strength may be in reminding us about adulthood.

And that’s sounds pretty good to me. After all, you’d want the people who aspire to lead the world behaving like adults, wouldn’t you?  It will be easier to be proud of ourselves if we do.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on January 30, 2009
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