I'll admit it, I'm a cynic. Genetics be what they may, growing up in the south as the only male (and eldest) child of a career military officer and a fundamentalist certainly doesn't help matters. Life's rough, things don't always go your way, the government and God are out to punish you, and politics were the playground of the rich and out-of-touch; a high school popularity contest for those whose egos never matured much past jocks and cheerleaders, school girl rumors and locker room banter.
Some things happened along the way, as they always do. I grew up and moved out west, trading grey thoughts and bright summer skies for brighter thoughts and the greyer skies of perpetual autumn. Gone are the smells of coal plants and the jarring sounds of southern rock, replaced with the eye-widening aroma of anytime, anywhere coffee and the depressingly true, yet energetic music of urban life.
Safe and secure in the suburbs it is so easy to tune out the urban symphony and the truth it sings, ears muffled behind double hung windows, wrapped up in the sweet electric caress of twenty-four hour news. All the while the park dweller lives what the television can only speak, clutching the cold, wet, grey-and-black caress of yesterday's news, its words failing to keep him warm. He knows the reality: those pretty printed phrases fail to fill his stomach; they flutter and disappear, forgotten on even the lightest, most fanciful of breezes.
I had grown up in a life divorced from the harsh reality the newspaper-clad park dweller faced daily. His strife wasn't my own. Mine was a world filled with SUVs and backyard pools, homework and hurry. I was instilled with the rhetoric and rites of the cynic: nothing good ever happens and nothing ever changes, no matter what you do. I wrapped myself up in the comfort that afforded, no longer having the pressures of responsibility: responsibility for my government or my fellow Americans. I accepted the fact that I was only one person, I can't make a difference, I can't change the world. I would have to be content with voting between the lesser of two evils who never serve any interest other than their own. The park dweller was resigned to his fate, and I to mine.
This is the society in which I, and I suspect most of us, have lived in. A people powered democracy where We The People are somehow powerless. Our motivation, our inspiration, our expectations, all shot to ruins under the weight of this constructed reality, a reality in which we truly are powerless, shackled not by iron, not by class, but by the harshest master of all: ourselves. No army or depression or great world war defeated us. We did, on our own. We let indifference and apathy shackle us, tell us what we can't do, tell us that we can't change anything, we can't hope for something better, for hope is ephemeral.
Yet, somewhere in the rich sea of cloudy grey that I live I realized that I can't continue down this path of self defeat. Today we have a candidate who will listen to us, who wants us to hope, who challenges us to dream, who asks us to help change the world. Most of all, however, he wants us to believe in ourselves, for we are a powerful force for change.
To my fellow cynics, to those who, like me, all too eagerly proceeded down the well traveled road of the status quo, I challenge you to dare to dream. To dare to hope. To dare to believe in something more. To have faith not only in a single candidate, but yourselves. To believe that someone in Washington wants to hear your voice, wants your voice to shape our national dialog. To believe, to accept that we won't always have to choose between two candidates who don't represent us, that good things will happen if we work together for them. This is the true choice this election: will we continue to wrap ourselves in the comfort of familiarity, the comfort of the 'evil we know', and instead strive for the unknown? Will we risk believing in something, or will our childish fear of the unknown and of being let down keep us from our dreams?
Each of us has the power to help change the world, to wrap the poor in the warmth of our own actions, rather than the empty promises of a thousand words. This is the power we have to shape reality, if we only dare to hope, to dare to dream. We can cast out our cynicism, learn to hope and dream and once again be a people powered government that is by The People and for The People. We can, America, we can.
