Obama phenomenon offers fleeting euphoria

I’ve watched with great curiosity and yes, hope, the rise of Barack Obama to the highest seat of power in the land.

But as he took the oath of office today, Jan. 20, I reaffirmed again that my hope has never been projected on him. He seems like an honest, talented man who has chosen a career in an ancient profession reserved for the ambitious: politics. Now he’s gotten the ultimate quarterback nod in his profession. Good for him. I hope he does well, for all of our sakes.

However, he is still out there for me, beyond the reach of my everyday life. Obama will not come to my rescue when I confront a crisis in the world I deal with day-to-day, nor will he appear in my family photos. Sure, maybe in some larger geo-political sense he will affect my taxes, or my job security, and even the air I breathe.

But he is not magical to me, nor even superhuman. He’s just a man, who will depend on a lot of other folks to get things done right.

I do not want to see him idolized, or held above on some cloud of pretentious omnipotence. In fact, I fear that impulse, or groupthink, which has led this nation into so many of its woes over the years.

I suspect Obama feels the same way, though he will use the groundswell of euphoria over his election to his advantage in advancing his agenda if he is a smart politician. But he also is a wise man, from what I can see, and so must recognize the tendency of jubilant crowds to turn on their idols when the adulation succumbs to impatience and human selfishness.

Humans are not meant to be gods, nor can they long stand the heat in that Hell’s kitchen.

So I do not pin my hopes on Obama, any more than I would pin them on you. This is about what I do going forward, what we do going forward. Obama’s presidency will be judged by the success he has in manipulating the levers of power toward clearing a path for us to pursue our goals. It’s always about that, not T-shirts, slogans and inauguration parties.

But we will have to come to agreement over the nature of those goals. Obama can use the bully pulpit and his legislative pen to direct that process, but, ultimately, we have to buy into it, or we will surely remain a nation doomed to rebuilding a Tower of Babel.

Some say Obama’s election could lead to a new golden age for organizers, a chance for the gifted among them to recalibrate the nation’s agenda toward a more progressive tilt. After all, Obama himself was an organizer, so he must understand that spirit, or at least be open to it.

Undoubtedly, organizers will emerge to test these new waters, and some will earn the deserved respect of their communities. But, just as assuredly, there will be charlatans in the mix who will prey on people’s hopes to sate their own narcissistic cravings.

To me, though, that is not the real test in this case. After all, most movements, if successful, eventually morph into entrenched bureaucracies whose primary accountability is to their own survival, and in that insularity and unresponsiveness, they open the way for counter-movements — an endless cycle in human history.

We need only look at the Catholic church as an example of an institution spawned by devoted organizers whose movement, against overwhelming odds initially, achieved great success, only to atrophy into a global bureaucracy still capable of good but also of defending great wrongs within its midst for the sake of institutional survival — a tendency that over the centuries has given rise to a host of new organizers and new religious movements.

So the wheel turns, and the course remains circular in that sense. The point is that any movement whose outcome ultimately gives rise to a bureaucracy leads to change we cannot long have faith in as individuals.

And that brings me back to Obama, the man. With the deck stacked against him, he managed, through brilliant organizing tactics and an inspiring message, to overcome the survival instincts arrayed against him within another huge bureaucracy — the Democratic Party. And as a consequence of that victory, he now finds himself in command of the federal government’s über bureaucracy.

Obama’s journey, though, is unique in the sense that he succeeded in outflanking the bureaucracy by appealing to the individual, to each of us on a personal level. He certainly seems to understand that is his true constituency, probably more than any politician in recent history. But he also must recognize the bureaucracy he has inherited will command much of his time and isolate him at the same time, a conundrum that will test even his skills.

But it is Obama’s recognition of the power of the people, to me, that is the real hope. That power is in each of us, within the close bonds we build among each other, directly, and not through the filter of giant bureaucracies — whether they be government or corporate in nature.

Obama’s greatest test will be to keep that spirit alive, to build on it, even as he now leads the most powerful bureaucracy on Earth. Can it be done? Is it humanly possible? I’m not sure.

I do know that showering blind adoration on Obama is the most isolating curse we can visit upon him, and such idol worship is among the greatest treacheries we can unleash upon our own individuality, our own families, our own communities, where we still have some hope of building bonds that collectively, across this nation, hold out the promise of changing the world one small deed at a time.

Obama is not magical, nor a messiah. To treat him so is to dehumanize him in a profound sense. He may be a good man, with good intentions. But going forward, to keep hope alive, to create lasting change, we must organize our own hearts and deeds, and assure we each carry our own weight in the struggle to do more good than harm in this world.

This must be a movement built not only from the bottom up, but from outside the bureaucracy as well.