I strongly recommend Michael Learner, founder of Tikkun magazine, essay on what makes the Obama phenomenon so special.
What he argues is that Obama uses nonviolent communication of refusing to demonize his opponents, and that this has triggered a sort of spiritual reawakening on a lot of people.
The important element of this reawakening is that Obama is reminding us that we are the agents of change. That we can break the barrier of fear that divide us and work together as one people.
As he writes this, he touches on a number of great points which I will quote below the fold.
It is a long, thoughtful essay. It is worth the time that you will put into reading it.
Before you go ahead and read it, I would like to first translate the spiritual language of Michael Learner into secular speech. It often happens that the spiritually inclined use the traditional language of religion and mysticism to talk about different issues.
Unfortunately this language makes many secularly minded people to quickly dismiss what they are talking about. And after about 30 years of the religious right, some liberals have trouble listening to it as soon as it the language appears.
So let me translate into secularese what may be the most important concept of Learner that you will find again and again.
Humans need meaning in their lives and to belong to a community. They yearn to overcome fear, alienation, and selfishness.
This desire for meaning and community is often described by Learner as "spiritual hunger." Living this meaningful life and a feeling of being connected and alive in a community is what Learner often calls "spirituality."
He probably has a more complex and subtle definition of spirituality, but this is often the meaning that he uses in the context of this piece.
Okay, now to the quotes.
*Obama's movement carries the same energy as the energy of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s
The energy, hopefulness, and excitement that manifests in Obama’s campaign has shown up before in the last fifty years, only to quickly be crushed. It was there in the 1960s and 1970s in the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, and the movement for gay liberation. One felt it flowing at rallies and demonstrations at which Robert Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Betty Friedan, Isaac Deutscher, Joan Baez, and Martin Luther King, Jr. articulated their visions. It was there again in Earth Day, in the anti-nuclear movement, and in the movement against the war with the Contras. It was there during the campaign of Jesse Jackson in 1988 and the Clintons’ campaign in 1992. And it has been there—dare we say it—in the growth of the religious right and the Campus Crusade for Christ.
* Obama has been able to make us break down the barriers that makes us feel seperated
Recently, some columnists have compared Obama to a rock star because his supporters seem to treat him more like that than like a politician. They are only partially mistaken. What the best and most fulfilling rock concerts of the past several decades have offered one generation is what other multi-generational mega-churches or Super Bowls and World Series’ offer to others: a chance to momentarily experience a transcendence of all those feelings of loneliness and alienation, a momentary ability to be part of a “we” that reminds us of what it feels like to be less alone. For a moment we experience a community of shared purpose, and no matter how intellectually, psychologically, or spiritually empty that moment might be, for that moment we get a distorted but, nevertheless, powerful way of reminding ourselves of how much more we could be than when we are alone and scared.
* Not directly about Obama, but this is an interesting alternative explanation for why working class people moved towards the right
Obama’s appeal starts from his insistence on not demonizing the Other—the very point from which Tikkun started as a project of the Institute for Labor and Mental Health (ILMH) twenty-two years ago. At ILMH we learned—through conducting an intensive study of working class consciousness—that people moving to the Right politically were not primarily motivated by racism, sexism, and hatred, but by the spiritual crisis in their lives that the Left failed to address and the Right spoke to (albeit with distorted solutions).
* Obama reminds us that it is us who have the power to change things
Obama knows that most people want a very different world, but don’t believe it is possible unless someone else makes it happen. He challenges his audience by telling them that there is no one else, that they themselves are the people who must make the world different. To quote Obama from his Super Tuesday speech: “So many of us have been waiting so long for the time when we could finally expect more from our politics, when we could give more of ourselves and feel truly invested in something bigger than a particular candidate or cause. This is it. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
In short, Obama is telling his supporters, we are not in need of some magical leader, not even Obama himself. Rather, what we need is the confidence in ourselves to reclaim the public space, to break down our fears about ourselves and each other, and to recognize that it is only when we move beyond our personal lives and work together for our highest vision that anything substantial will change.
This is enough for right now. I will later write about Learner's request to start building right away the social movement that Obama is inspiring. :)
"http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/tik0803/frontpage/phenom">http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/tik0803/frontpage/phenom
