It all comes back to inspiration
Judith Timson reflects on Michelle Obama’s DNC speech,
We wake every morning to news of fresh violence, new disaster, more innocent lives lost. Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, France, America. Knives, guns, vests, bombs, a huge weaponized white truck that has made it nauseating for me and no doubt others to see benign versions of it everywhere on our streets.
We don’t have time to catch our breath, let alone process the grief and analytics of yet another attack. A nightclub in Orlando, a centre for the disabled near Tokyo, a square in Kabul, a promenade in Nice, a church in Normandy. Why? Who? What? Our minds, busy with our personal challenges, can’t grasp all the variables, from mental illness to lax security, from cheap and easy guns to murderous jihadist imperatives, from inequality and otherness to rage and privilege.
People shut down. Among some friends and family, I seem to be the first bearer of bad news — did you hear what just happened in Normandy? — simply because they don’t always follow the latest news. They can’t bear to.
Is it any wonder people yearn for something else? Canadians did. They opted, in the last federal election, after nearly a decade of grim and punitive politics, for a sunnier outlook and a less cynical approach to solving our ever-present problems.
With hopeful but not exactly profound slogans like “In Canada, better is always possible” and “Sunny ways, my friends,” Justin Trudeau swept his Liberal party into a majority government, and much to the chagrin of his opponents, they are still, almost 10 months later, riding high in the polls.
There is a reason for this. Why on earth would you vote to feel bad about yourself and your country, living on the knife edge of grievance and fear, if you could choose to feel good, and hopeful and inspired?
I thought of this while watching U.S. first lady Michelle Obama deliver a speech so good that so-called real politicians should regard it as a master class in connecting on a real level with real people. She slayed at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. She made grown men and women cry with joy, not only on that convention floor, but at home on their sofas. I even cried the next day as I rewatched her speech.
It was ostensibly a rousing endorsement of Hillary Clinton and believe me, Mrs. Obama made the case for a somewhat embattled but undeniably qualified nominee to be president better than anyone else thus far had made.
With a reminder that Hillary Clinton has “never quit on anything in her life,” Michelle Obama homed in on her own children and everyone else’s as the best reason to vote for Clinton. There was no one else she trusted, she said “to shape our children’s lives.”
I’ve tried to parse how she did it, and I kept coming back to inspiration.
While I started this column saying we wake every morning to bad news, Michelle Obama reminded her audience that in the White House, “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves,” she said. “And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.”
Her words were received with adulation. No great speeches memorialized in history are ever about negativity or fear or rage; they are about telling a story.
Michelle Obama told her story, one that Americans can be proud of. Eight years ago, she became the first African-American first lady, her husband the first black president. I can’t tell you how much I will miss, to plagiarize from her, their “grace and decency.” I will miss just looking at them.
But Obama didn’t stop at her story. Great speeches never do. She said that “because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all our sons and daughters now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States. So, don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great, that somehow we need to make it great again, because this right now is the greatest country on Earth.”
Americans may not make that historical choice. Author and documentary filmmaker Michael Moore just argued in a Huffington Post piece that Donald Trump — “this wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath” — will win the general election, partly because of the anger over “a broken political system” and partly because, in a voting booth, citizens are kings and queens and can mark a ballot with a frisson of anarchy if they want. A voting booth, wrote Moore, “is one of the few places left in society where . . . no one can make you do anything.”
Donald Trump winning the election is another kind of story, far less inspiring to many of us horrified by the hate, bigotry and rage that has fuelled his campaign. We hope that story will be left on the cutting room floor. We hope the next 100 or so days won’t be as viciously destructive as these past primary months.
“When they go low, we go high,” Michelle Obama said.
Justin Trudeau did exactly that, and won big. But America is another country, in charge of its own story. Voters get to decide what inspires them. High or low, that is the power — and the peril — of democracy. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@ sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson
No great speeches memorialized in history are ever about negativity or fear or rage; they are about telling a story