Democracy in America, Part Two

Part one appears below, or link here if you are reading this post independent of the main blog.


Descent and Return

Before I drove out east in the summer of 2004, I wrote and directed and performed in a play called The Bonfire. It was supposed to be about high school, but it was really about America in 2004. Characters argued over gay marriage, a small town store shut down due to corporate chains, and people lost their way. Including me.

For most of the next two years, not a whole lot made sense to me, and I was an unpleasant person to be around much of the time. I found myself in a job that didn’t challenge me, I pissed away several good relationships, and I dreamed of starting over somewhere far, far away. I didn't understand this country anymore, I didn't understand myself, and I desperately needed something different.

It’s funny how you can get to certain points in your life, and it’s just as funny how you get out of them. Things got better, as they always do. There were certain points where I began to realize that: walking along the Quay in Waterford, Ireland; sitting outside the cabin in Wisconsin in the fall of 2006; June 29th of this year. These strange moments of clarity, burned into my soul forever.

I went back to teaching fifth grade. My shows got better. Friends I had driven away came back. I worked hard to remake myself into a better person, and embraced everything around me.

[Now, it would be presumptuous of me to sit here and say that my decline and eventual renewal was due to the Democrats winning back Congress in the November 2006 elections. That’s not where this is going. The events of my life and what happened in America over the past eight years are mutually exclusive, but at the same time it makes for an interesting storytelling device, so I’m going to keep going with it.]

While my life improved, though, America’s situation was growing worse and worse every month. Worldwide opinion of this country plummeted, as did our economy, and our hope for a better future. The Bush presidency finally revealed itself as a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and the American people, all too comfortable with ignoring the precarious situation their country was in, finally took its head out of the sand and started to take notice.

The first inklings of this discontent was felt in those November 2006 elections, but it really began to take shape in those daily conversations people had around me. For the first time in a long while, I was listening to people talk about their government, their hopes and fears, as opposed to what had happened on television the night before.

It is still a sad fact that most Americans probably could care less about what happens outside of their own front door, but then that is probably the case with a lot of peoples. Carville had it right: “it’s the economy, stupid.” When food prices go up, when gas gets too expensive, when people can’t pay for their children’s health care—that’s when they start paying attention.

People started looking for answers, and explanations, and found little support in the helpless and clueless Bush White House. The race for the White House began earlier than it ever has, as people like Hilary Clinton and John McCain and Mitt Romney jumped into the fray. And one other person.

On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama announced he was running for President of the United States.