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From The Asian Reporter, V18, #6 (February 5, 2008), page 7.
Vote for me: Rat Year and Election Year 2008
Ah Lunar Year 4706. A good year. A Rat year.
Rats, any elder auntie will tell you, are practical and hardworking. They calculate costs and benefits before they act. Toward others they seem charming but are really cunning. Rats are good leaders. Big rats include: General and President George Washington, millionaire and President George H.W. Bush, millionaire and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Rats, big and small, will have a good year. And maybe the rest of us too.
But, I tell you true: I am a bit worried. Lots of others are too, especially back home. Families of Oregon immigrants are sitting and worrying in Eastern Europe, in Africa and Asia and Spanish-speaking America, on a dozen distressed Oceana islands, and across our Muslim world.
Worried because, although lots of things at the top are bound to change this year in America, in election year America — no one running for national office is saying much about how us Americans must now change. Must now make a smaller footprint.
Oh sure, everyone running for President — Democrats and Republicans, black and white, male and female, Catholic and Protestant and Mormon alike — talks on and on about "change." Change is Campaign 08’s big buzz word. Everyone’s for it. Change.
"Vote for me, and you vote for change."
But the "change" everyone’s promising us in trade for our votes is change in federal fiscal policy, change in U.S. foreign policy, in family healthcare, in our children’s schooling. The tidy public apparatus of our complex urban lives. Aaall that, is going to get better, they promise. We’re all going to get bigger. America’s going to get happier. Vote for me.
The promised change will be those stammering institutions around us. You and me, we are assured, won’t have to change. Indeed, they say, we needn’t give up a doggone thing. If only you vote for me.
Of course this is how leaders, eager to be elected, talk to us. Conservatives and Liberals all the same. And sure, this is what we want to hear — you and me waiting for our gasping economy to reach us at our shaky jobs, stressed by our at-risk kids. Deer in headlights. You and me hoping not to get that late night phone call about my son, your daughter, or our nephew, perished on patrol in some angry Iraqi back alley. So alone. So far from home.
I’ll change all that. Certainly I will. Vote for me.
No pain, I promise
So of course, folks running this campaign year, this Rat Year, will not tell us that our lives are going to have to get smaller. Our expectations, realer. None will say that we’re all going to have to learn how to give up some of the goodies. Get slimmer.
Politicians pushing and shoving for our approval and our votes never suggest that some pain is part of his or her plan to make life more safe, more fair, more fine, for all our anxious families everywhere. Of course not. Who would promise pain?
And it makes you wonder. We are an energetic nation. Well fed. Well educated. Well armed. The best. With so much in our hearts, in our big homes, inside our broad borders, it should be obvious to us how much harm our insatiable hunger and our relentless insecurity is causing our awfully wobbly world.
It ought to be easy to hear how angry men are. Everywhere. Men unable to provide for their families, unable to protect them. From us. Fathers and sons in big cities and little villages in countries American immigrants left not long ago are becoming bitter. At you and me.
You can’t help but feel that our big illusion, that this ravenous American dreaming, is no longer sustainable.
And still, our outgoing President is promising to put 600 economy- stimulating dollars back in each hip pocket. So we can buy some more dreams. Still, the candidates for his expiring office rush out competing proposals, all promising smart ways for us to feel big again. To feel good, again.
Still, pictures of U.S. soldiers never coming home appear in our morning papers. Still, Iraqi pops don’t come back from work, second graders go missing after school, moms don’t get home from market. For all those unspeakable losses, our leaders still require no change from U.S. energy giants or auto manufacturers. And just as surely they ask no change from us. No personal sacrifice. Dream on.
No one at the top is preparing us for better sharing our shrinking earth. The president making those promises and those who badly want his job are not leading well. And the fault is clearly ours.
Better bosses this year
President Kennedy scolded Americans "ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Mahatma (Great Soul) Gandhi asked every devout Indian of all castes to take a beating. The Reverend Dr. King led his believers straight into ferocious police dogs, ugly fire hoses, murderous snipers. The Lion of Africa, Nelson Mandela, told his humiliated millions to open their hearts. To forgive. To give, not to take.
Change, each of these leaders promised, begins at home. With giving. And sharing our burdens.
Change is not a job. Politicians are a distraction, terrific entertainment when we’re feeling down. At best, elected bosses are managers of the policies and practices we’re responsible for picking for our precious blue planet. Taking the lead, making change, that’s our job.
Ah Rat Year 4706. What’s that o-o-old Manado saying about winning the rat race? (A: You’re still a rat).
Okay, Election Year 2008, and what’s the immigrant American ethos about democracy, about freedom? (A: Democracy is a delicate invitation to participate in our governing process. And freedom? — we are always free to leave our fate, the fate of our families here and back home, to politicians practicing feel-good promises.)