Whence cometh our hope?

Last night at dinner with friends and acquaintances the conversation was pretty much continuous, wide ranging, and consistently both engaged and engaging. This morning Lorraine commented about the fact that no one there had mentioned Obama’s acceptance speech in Oslo. It hadn’t occurred to me, perhaps because I was either engaged or engaging, but when she mentioned the fact it did also strike me as odd. It wasn’t that we didn’t talk about politics at all, as there was some discussion of Ron Graham’s article on Michael Ignatieff, but the implicit ironies of Obama’s speech never came up. And when I checked just now on Al Jazeera for some commentary, the America’s Blog piece, Obama’s Big Sellout written by Teymoor Nabili, turned out to be about Wall Street and financial bailouts rather than a reflection on the saddening aspects of that Peace Prize speech.

So there it is. He made his speech, or, to be more accurate, he delivered his lecture. A very thoughtful and capable young student we know in Istanbul posted a Facebook comment: War is Peace. And Lorraine and I talked not about Orwell, but about the end of hope. It was not a statement of despair, and not in fact the end of all hope, but the end of hoping for some change for the better to come from the USA. The fact that the person, that smart and engaging young guy who had once seemed so eloquent and charismatic and inspirational, became President, the President, and then became so entangled in the convolutions of American style legislative bartering, that he had to deliver a speech to appease his opponents at home rather than talk to the world about hope and possibility, was profoundly saddening. It was less an opportunity missed than it was a hard slap of cold reality in a difficult world. And a statement of something that has been lost.

It was not really such a bad lecture/speech. You can find the full text here, and it's definitely worth a read if you missed it on Thursday. It was thoughtful and deliberative and carefully constructed, as I suppose it needed to be in this political world, but the fact that it was more about justifications for the use of power, military power, economic power, American power, than about meaningful reflections on the use of that power and exploration of peaceful alternatives was deeply disappointing. You can’t see it in the text but you can in the look of the crowd who were listening, the deep impassivity on their faces, a suggestion that we were not the only ones saddened by it.

Lorraine talked about a time long ago when we did look to the US for ideas and ideals, where there was some hope, perhaps naïve, but it was a hope for something good that might come from there. It’s not a place to look for hope right now and probably never will be again. And so the question, with its resonances of the King James Version of Christianity, is this: Whence cometh our hope?

It’s a good question, no matter the version or language, and there are some good answers walking around out there, though none are easy. I’m not going to get into them here, because that’s another story, or bunch of stories, but I do just wish that on Thursday Barack Obama could have found a way to be at least a part of one of those answers.