Where The Details Matter
During those "retirement" years that I spent as a dishwasher and line person at the food kitchen, it took me a short time to realize that there was something different in conversations of our clientele and a long time to realize what it was. All my life, whether it be my parents, my wife, my children, my grandchild and all their acquaintences, there had always been an element of the what the future holds in our conversations, all wrapped up in some alchemy of hope, ambition, and pure day dreaming. It was not in the listening, but in the talking to these good people in the food line that I discovered that the future was nearly abscent from their conversation, because becoming can never be disconnected from a vision of the paths you might take to get there. It it not so much that these folks never in their lives day dreamed about a maybe, it is the seldomness inwhich the maybe came true that formed who they have become. So when I would ask about the future, the response was often some form of I haven't got time for that.
That is the way the boy was when he first came to me at six years old. It was not until he held the cornet in his hand that dreams started to make sense to him. He is still remarkably detail oriented for someone his age, but he is better at making room for pure dreaming. That transition was made easier for the boy because of his mother, whose childhood had allowed room for such matters that her early adulthood had to put aside, was a good role model in his life.
I bring this point up because some people I have talked to of late wonder how it is that the very people, whom from their point of view at least, most need Barack's message of hope would seem to reject it for Hillary' laundry list. This does not surprise me in the least. It is at the very heart of the political deficit that Obama has before him. That the educated, comfortable middle class, and the young of those groups, and yes the black man who sees Barack as a personification of his message, swoon at the very mention of hope, is merely a confirmation of their own life story.
On the other hand, when you sit at the kitchen table and wonder how you will afford the next gallon of gas that will take you to a job that does not pay you enough to afford both it and food, and you just got off the phone for the third time that day lieing to some collection agency about how the check for the medical bills that vastly outstrip your ability to ever pay is in the mail, the details of just how any of this might be a little more manageable is in fact all you have time for. When this is the nature of your life, hope simply does not cut it. When hope has been disconnected from faith, and charity is no where to be found, a message that centers around these things has the ring of elitist clap trap.
This may very well be the Democrats year if a complete moron were to be their nominee, and whatever else, Mister Obama is anything but a moron. But I have a fear that this man's message of hope will die aborning if he does not fill in some of the details that clarify the path to it for those whose current experience is that such paths have been washed away in the flood of all that is so gloriously new.
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