If the world were merely the predictable pain of war. If the world were merely the woman in the supermarket who unexpectedly weeps as she cleans the slop in aisle 5 for six-dollars an hour. If the world were only that, and the logical implications of that — if the world were only this, here, and the logical implications of here.
Who would want it? Not her. Not me.
The poetry of politics is more than the gotcha of scandal. More than, I say, winning. We sing of the polis. The city. We sing of us.
And yes, we are in pain. The nearly-burnt cigarette of national discourse that smokes and stinks because no one bothered to crush it out is what we talk about in the barrooms of the actual. But here’s the thing:
We’re still here. And we still mean it.
You see, we really weren’t kidding, as kids, when we said we wanted something better.
and we really aren’t kidding now. We, you, us, are better than this. And you know it. And I know it. And that, in an odd way, is a terrible burden.
The problem (if I might paraphrase a poem by Mary Oliver) is that a story should have trees in it. And sunlight. And anything happy. I don’t know whether the woman cleaning slop in aisle 5 will find a better life. But maybe she will.
And that “maybe” is all there is to hope. That’s it. That’s all.
I meet the eyes of the homeless man and I give him a fiver. Not because I expect him to buy food. It’s his now. Because we’re all in this together. And yes, we are in pain.
(In case you might be wondering, no, I have never been homeless. I once spent a year sleeping on the floor of a 100-year-old house in a sleeping bag. The toilet froze in the winter. Not because I wanted to. I bagged groceries.)
I have never slept in public.
But many have. You ask me, “Why are we in Iraq?” And I reply, “The Jove in the White House never slept in public. He never peed into a frozen toilet. He never saw this side of America.” Terror is as terror does.
There is something — I don’t know, educational — about sticking your hands into a factory glass-oven 200 times a day, in a factory, next to people who gave up hope before puberty, who will be here, here, all their lives. In a limited way, I was born priviledged. But I was unstable enough not to care. And so I slept on the wrong side of the tracks, in a sleeping bag.
It gives you a certain perspective.
My point in all this is that we lose perspective when we lose sight of the purpose of politics, of the song of the polis. The point is to help the woman in aisle 5. To help the folks in the glass-factory. To make a government that . . . get this . . . exists for the populace. No one is out there alone, in my dream. We’re all in this together.
