Obama Inspired at 30,000 feet

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  Bangkok, Thailand
Friday, March 14, 2008

Before you read this, watch this video.

I had an interesting dialogue with Chris on Friday night over drinks. Chris asked, what's my goal in life? I told him that honestly I didn't know. He asked, isn't it to make money? I didn't know how to answer. I didn't know what my goal was then.

Now I find myself sitting here on this 12-hour plane flight from Auckland to Bangkok reading Obama's wonderful The Audacity of Hope, a book written by a man who is clearly much smarter than me and who clearly has goals. So reading Obama--and drinking with Chris--got me to thinking: what really are my goals. Why am I on this trip? Why do I keep going? How can I keep going? (I'm starting to feel a bit burnt out, you see).

And I think I see it a bit more clearly now. Back when I was a student at the now defunct Sierra Nevada College in Tahoe working to get my teaching credential, one of the advisors there told me she felt it was wise to return to school every ten years or so. That was ten years ago. Just over a year ago, when I decided that I must quit Lockheed and take a year or more to travel, with the voice of that advisor in my head and the worried thoughts of my parents, I largely believed that a desire to go to graduate school would build inside me as I traveled and that I would indeed enroll in some program in the fall of 2008 upon return. I figured that while I was on the journey traveling around the Eastern Hemisphere that I would discover exactly what it was I wanted to study and what then I would want to do for at least the next ten years. It hasn't happened. (Or I hoped a rich benefactor would adopt me and sponsor a lifetime of traveling and exploring, no strings attached. Shockingly, that hasn't happened either.)

Instead what I realized sitting here on the plane is that what I wanted to study-what I wanted to know-what I wanted to see and experience-is what exactly is our world. I don't want to read it out of a book or learn it from a professor or see it in a slideshow or from the lens of a movie director. I want to learn it directly, as best I can, through the only unbiased but terribly biased means that I can dream of: through my eyeballs, through the touch of my own fingers, through the beautiful and awful scents directly entering my own nose, through the blistering cacophony of endless honking hours or absolute beauty of nothing but the chirping of a million nearly extinct birds mixed with the rustling of leaves.

Along the way I've also attempted to enhance my experience through well-selected books that you and others have recommended or given me. Books like Obama's The Audacity of Hope and his Dreams From My Father, or Freakonomics and Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bryson's books on the English language (Mother Tongue, Made in America), Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn, Guns, Germs and Steel, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and Motorcycle Diaries. Each of these books makes attempts to dig out reasons and initial causes to explain why the world is the way it is. Many of them also make recommendations on how to make our world better. Obama and Perkins (Confessions) both call for abandonment of America's dependence on oil and both give ideas on how to do so. Lasn builds an argument for how giving corporations too many rights has corrupted US society and he prescribes many wise changes based on that argument. Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel) revolutionalized my understanding of how the world's powers of today came through a theory he developed based only on geography and environment. His careful gathering and explanation of the evidence asserts his theory. Bryson's History uncovers some painful truths and fascinating details about events our history books left behind or breezed past during the journey of humans that led to the current civilization we have today. His light and humorous prose-I call him the best English writer alive-provides an enjoyable more easily read compliment to Guns, Germs and Steel. Books like Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, Somerset Maugham's Razor's Edge, Krakauer's Into the Wild, and Jamling Tenzig Norgay's Touching My Father's Soul have also taught me not only about parts of the world and but also more about truths and morals that I hold dear but could never express as clearly or beautifully as they. Then of course there are the voices of Kerouac, Steinbeck, Hemmingway, and Edward Abbey that I carry everywhere in my heart. I even amuse myself on occasion by replaying some Larry Harvey in my head.

So I am in a way going back to school like I wanted. And I have a hypothesis that I am testing. I've always said-and this is by no means original but I truly believe it-that people are people, that when it comes down to it the average person wants the same thing as any other person: they want their children to grow up happy, they want to eat, and they want to have a safe and comfortable place to share and enjoy the company of those they cherish. I know this by no means original because I feel it's the basic premise of Obama's The Audacity of Hope.

Is the world really flat? No. It's becoming flatter but it's far from flat. (I never finished Friedman's book. Sure he brings to light a truth about our rapidly changing world and portrays first hand anecdotes of globalization but I don't think that what he writes comes as any news to my Generation X or any of those generations following me.)

I really like Obama. He wants what I want. Tax the rich. Invest in higher education, research, and alternative energy. Lower dependence on oil. Preserve the choice for women to have an abortion. He's sensible, down to earth, knows people are people, and sees the common thread. He doesn't dismiss someone as heretic simply because they don't believe what he believes or what a Democrat or what a liberal believes. He works with opponents, focuses on what we all have in common rather than focusing and dividing on how we differ. He sees the complexities of health care and globalization and free trade and wants what I want. He wants what will best serve the total human world population. His heroes clearly are Clinton, FDR, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Washington. And he views Bush and Reagan as destroyers of FDR and Clinton's successes. He may just be Jeb Bartlett.

Warren Buffet also really impresses me. Obama included a dialogue with Buffet in The Audacity of Hope in which Buffet rails on Bush for giving the rich tax breaks. Buffet's the richest person in the world. He knows he can afford any tax. He points even 90% of his income still leaves him a very rich man. Buffet feels outraged that he only has to pay 15% tax. He knows that by him paying taxes and having those taxes invested in ways that Obama desires (education, research, removing dependence on oil) that our country will only become stronger and thus in the end Buffet's investments will grow. The US is great but it did become great by letting the rich get richer while invading foreign countries and starting prolonged, messy wars.

Obama also gives an explanation that I have long accepted for the place that religion holds in society.

"[Americans] want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift them above the exhausting, relentless toll of life. They need assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them-that they are not just destined to travel down a long highway toward nothingness." [p 202]

This journey of mine fills the void that most fill with religion. I also fill the void through my love and exploration of the natural world; by witnessing the miracles of life and the beauty, the diversity that the natural world holds.

In Nepal on the Everest trek, staying at a guesthouse near Gokyo, a sentence scrawled on the backside of the door to my room read, "The void followed me to Nepal. It makes no difference where I am." So sad...I often think about whomever wrote that sentence. I hope he or she, like me and like those who have found religion, has found some way to fill the void.

What I also love about Obama that I gathered from his first book, Dreams From My Father, is that the very nature of his upbringing tied to the path of success he placed himself on makes him a leader that American desperately needs. The world's excited to have Obama become America's leader. His father was a Kenyan government employee. His mom was an anthropologist, she was a tender woman who sought to understand everyone. Obama spent 5 years going to public schools in Indonesia. He's immersed himself in the struggles of the black community in Chicago. Who better to become the president of the USA today-which candidate does the Muslim world feel comfortable with? Which candidate is most likely to inspire peace in Africa? In the Middle East?

I have nothing really against Hillary. For that matter, I have essentially nothing against McCain. They're both American heroes. Obama's just better. I predict-I hope--he'll rise to the glory of FDR, of Kennedy, of Clinton minus Monica. And I also fear he'll never be recognized for his greatness until it's too late, like Carter.

So this trip has given me time to explore things that I find important that I didn't have the time to explore while working.

On a lighter note, after reading Obama for hours on the plane and writing pages of thoughts that turned into this, my brain ached. So, I watched 'Little Miss Sunshine' again. A classic. I nearly peed myself from laughter. The 2 weeks in New Zealand with the Kirby family all back together in a Toyota rental van that had seen better days really did have some Little Miss Sunshine moments. Granted, no one turned out color blind, no one smoked heroin (that I know of), no one died, and no one entered a beauty contest, but the sliding door did fall off, a few eyeballs rolled more than once, a few arguments certainly ensued, a few things did lose themselves (um, camera, Mom?), occasionally the son (uh, me) took vows of silence, the radiator overheated continuously, and we got lost more times than I can count. Plus, throw in my family's love for air-cooled Volkswagens and the fact that our grandfather shared far more un-PC thoughts than the one in Little Miss Sunshine.

I continue to travel and soak in the world because I want proof that my hypothesis that people are people is true. Everything I encounter confirms that it is true. But, Travelpod says I've only been to 11% of the world, so there's a bit more research, a bit more reading, a bit more writing to go.

And, so, did you watch the YouTube video I included at the top? What was the point of the inclusion? I just don't want to go through life and miss the moon walking bear. Always be on the lookout.

Did I ever mention that I am the preeminent Proust scholar in the US?

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