Alice Walker
The Guardian, Saturday September 20 2008
I remember seeing a picture of Fidel Castro in a parade with lots of other
Cubans. It was during the emergency years, the “special period” when
Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union had collapsed and there was
little gas or oil or fertiliser; people were struggling to find enough to
eat. It was perhaps Cuba’s nadir, as a small Caribbean island nation
considered a dangerous threat by its nearest neighbour, the United States
- which, during this period, tightened its embargo. Fidel, tall, haggard,
his clothes hanging more loosely than usual from his gaunt frame, walked
soberly along, surrounded by thousands of likewise downhearted, fearful
people: he, like them, waving a tiny red, white and blue Cuban flag. This
photograph made me weep; not only because I love Fidel and the Cuban
people, but also because I was envious.
However poor the Cubans might be, I realised, they cared about each other
and they had a leader who loved them. A leader who loved them. Imagine. A
leader not afraid to be out in the streets with them, a leader not ashamed
to show himself as troubled and humbled as they were. A leader who would
not leave them to wonder and worry alone, but would stand with them, walk
with them, celebrate with them - whatever the parade might be.
This is what I want for our country, more than anything. I want a leader
who can love us. This is not what we usually say, or think of, when we are
trying to choose a leader. People like to talk about “experience” and war
and the economy, and making Americans look good again. I care about all
these things. But when the lights are out and I’m left with just the stars
in a super-dark sky, and I feel the new intense chill that seems to be the
underbreath of even the hottest day, when I know that global warming may
send our planet into a deep freeze even before my remaining years run out,
then I think about what it is that truly matters to me. Not just as a
human, but as an American.
I want a leader who can love us. And, truthfully, by our collective
behaviour, we have made it hard to demand this. We are as we are,
imperfect to the max, racist and sexist and greedy above all; still, I
feel we deserve leaders who love us. We will not survive more of what we
have had: leaders who love nothing, not even themselves. We know they
don’t love themselves because if they did they would feel compassion for
us, so often lost, floundering, reeling from one bad thought, one horrid
act to another. Killing, under order, folks we don’t know; abusing
children of whose existence we hadn’t heard; maiming and murdering animals
that have done us no harm.
I would say that, in my lifetime, it was only the Kennedys, in national
leadership, who seemed even to know what compassion meant; certainly John,
and then Bobby, were unafraid to grow an informed and open heart. (After
he left the White House, President Carter blossomed into a sheltering tree
of peace, quite admirably.) I was a student at a segregated college in
Georgia when John Kennedy was assassinated. His was a moral voice, a voice
of someone who had suffered; someone who, when looking at us in the south,
so vulnerable, so poor, so outnumbered by the violent racists surrounding
us, could join his suffering with ours. The rocking chair in which he sat
reminded us that he was somehow like us: feeling pain on a daily basis and
living a full-tilt life in spite of it. And Bobby Kennedy, whom a mentor
of mine, Marian Wright (later Edelman), brought to Mississippi years
later. He had not believed there were starving children in the United
States. Wright took him to visit the delta. Kneeling before these hungry
children in the Mississippi dirt and heat, he wept. We were so happy to
have those tears. Never before had we witnessed compassion in anyone sent
out to lead us.
The present administration and too many others before it have shown the
most clear and unapologetic hatred for the American people. A contempt for
our minds, our bodies and souls that is so breathtaking most Americans
have numbed themselves not to feel it. How can they do this or that awful
unthinkable thing, we ask ourselves and each other, knowing no one in
power will ever bother to answer us. I’m sure we, the American people, are
the butt of jokes by those in power. Our suffering not making a dent in
their pursuit of goals that almost always bring more tragedy and
degradation to our already fragile, disintegrating republic.
Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations
of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write
a sentence. The money for their education has gone to blow off someone
else’s intelligent and beautiful head. Visiting a hospital, I see sick and
frightened people who have no clue whether they will get the care they
need or whether it will be 15 minutes of an incompetent physician’s
opinion. If we were loved there would be a doctor free of charge, on every
block, with time to listen to us. Visiting our schools, I see no one has
seriously thought about teaching Americans what to eat, just as no one at
the national helm insists that we take sex education seriously and begin
to unencumber our planet of the projected hordes (Earth’s view) of coming
generations She can no longer tolerate.
Our taxes are collected without fail, with no input from us; sometimes,
because we lack jobs, paid with money we have to borrow. Our children are
sent places they never dreamed of visiting, to harm and make enemies of
people who, prior to their arrival, had thought well of them. Kind, smart,
freedom-loving Americans.
When we are offered a John McCain, who is too old for the job (and I
cherish old age and old men but not to lead the world when it is ailing),
or a George Bush, or a Sarah Palin, how unloved we are as Americans
becomes painfully plain. McCain talks of war with the nostalgia and
forgetfulness of the very elderly; Palin talks of forcing the young to
have offspring they neither want nor can sustain; both of them feel at
ease, apparently, with the game in which their candidacy becomes more of a
topic of discussion than whether the planet has a future under their
leadership.
Where does this leave us average Americans, who feel the chill of global
warming, the devastation of war, the terror of the food crisis, the horror
of advancing diseases? Hopefully with a sense of awakening: that we have
had few opportunities to be led by those who have the capacity to care for
us, to love us, and that we, in our lack of love for ourselves, have, too
often, not chosen them. Perhaps with the certainty that though we are as
we are and sorely imperfect, we still deserve someone in leadership who
“gets” us, and that this self-defeating habit of accepting our leaders’
contempt need not continue. Maybe with the realisation that we, the
people, are truly the leaders, and that we are the ones we have been
waiting for.
I write on September 9, my father’s birthday. A black farmer in Georgia,
he risked his life to vote in the 1930s for a “new deal”. If he had lived
and not died in his early 60s of overwork, ill health and heartbreak, he
would be 100 years old in 2009. Voting in November of 2008 for a candidate
with heart I will honour his faith.
© Alice Walker 2008
