Driving Votes: Jenny's Blog

Unwilling to Suspend Disbelief

I watched Bush’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention from a pizza shop in midtown Manhattan. Blocks away at Madison Square Garden, our president addressed the nation and presented a rosy simulacrum of reality; schools were getting better, Medicare was strengthened, we had tax relief and a growing economy, we were “extend[ing] the frontiers of freedom” and fighting evil, our foreign policy had made us safer by a process involving “careful diplomacy” and “clear moral purpose”…. Glued to the TV screen and mesmerized by the glossed-over convention world of pomp, circumstance, and applause, I could almost believe that everything was fine.

But then I stepped back on to the streets of New York and the fairy tale snapped. Because here in this city where such an accomplished leader would be welcomed with celebration, the streets were blockaded and guarded by cops in riot gear. New Yorkers and tourists had gathered on corners to watch the spectacle that was the delegates exiting the convention and to greet them with boos and cries of “Shame on you!” and “Go home. Stop using our city!” I stood with the crowds and marveled at the absurdity of it all: that we were thus divided, our leader versus the people, in what had sounded to me like a thriving democracy and during what could potentially be the joyful epitome of the democratic process, the (re-?)election of the president.

While I might write off this negative sentiment as attributable to bad choice of venue on the part of the Republicans, my conversations with people in swing states around the country beg me to consider otherwise. In Nevada, I met an elderly woman who finds it increasingly difficult to pay for her medication and who is definitely not voting for Bush, nor will any of her friends if she can help it. In Pennsylvania, I spoke with a taxi driver struggling to make ends meet for his family who told me nothing ever changes and who’s so angry that he’s not voting at all. In North Carolina, I talked with an aspiring doctor from a low income family who told me of months spent with a toothache because he was unable to get health insurance and who is voting for Kerry. In Florida, I encountered newly registered voters living in housing projects who hoped that the democratic process might lead to better, though they were still waiting and knew it wouldn’t happen under Bush.

These are the works of an administration that believes that "government should help people improve their lives, not try to run their lives” and a president who seems to think he has accomplished this. Bush’s acceptance speech list of achievements may ring true for some (“careful diplomacy” and “clear moral purpose” in foreign policy notwithstanding- you can only stretch the truth so far even for purposes of argument), but for a disproportionate number of Americans the sound is hollow. I suppose I shouldn’t expect any more from a president who has incited a country to divide over social issues (see: gay marriage, abortion, the role of church in government) while advancing an elitist and neoconservative agenda (see: tax cuts favoring the wealthy, war, diplomatic isolation). However, my unflagging hope that when a figurehead stands before the nation, power just might be speaking truth to the people gives me higher expectations. Bush falls inexcusably short of even my lowest.

I understand the appeal of subscribing to Bush’s convention night obfuscations. Believing that we have done good for our people and the world under the current administration is much more comfortable than confronting the reality that we have failed miserably on both counts. Yet we owe it to the vast numbers who continue to struggle in “the greatest nation on earth” and to those who have died in conflict to put aside the rhetoric. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or even a cowboy for that matter, to realize that we can do better; it does take a willingness to face our failures head on and to make a change.

The Desert City

There is something admittedly surreal about hopping in a car with four other people and driving twelve hours south through the state of California and east across the Mojave Desert to go register voters in Nevada. Arriving in Las Vegas at two in the morning, the lights of the city appeared suddenly before us as our car crested the last rise standing between just another road trip and our unlikely ambition; I’ve never gone to Las Vegas for exactly the right reasons. The first was to prove that it exists; the second was to get a president out of office.

The next day we canvassed neighborhoods adjacent to the Strip for Democratic and progressive voters in 105-degree heat. The combined effects of the temperature, sun, desert region, and our electoral activism made the reality that had brought me to Las Vegas feel very present. While there are a significant number of reasons why I am personally angered by this presidency -their failure to address the complete inadequacy of our current health care system, their surreptitious and deliberate erosion of environmental protections and our civil liberties, their treatment of gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals as second-class citizens- I always come back to the conflict in Iraq as an emotional trigger point.

Standing there in Las Vegas under a noonday desert sun, I couldn’t help wondering if this weren’t how Baghdad might feel. My mind reeled with thoughts of war, the loss of a best friend who was a soldier in Iraq by one of the members of our Driving Votes group, the loss of a parent in the September 11th terrorist attacks by a childhood friend of mine ... the ugliness of the circumstances that had brought me to this desert city was overwhelming.

But the thing is, I’m lucky enough that most days I don’t have to feel this. I don’t live in a war zone, nor does my family. I don’t know anyone personally who is in Iraq, U.S. soldier or Iraqi citizen. And I have been fortunate enough to find a rapidly expanding community of people who are just as upset as I am with what is going on in the world right now, with what our government is doing in our own country and in the world right now, and who are actively working to change this.

Meeting other first-time and experienced activists has been one of the many amazing things about getting involved with Driving Votes. Meeting other newly and already registered voters from swing states has been another one. In our two days in Las Vegas, we registered a nineteen-year-old who was excited to participate in his first presidential election and a former felon who had been upset to lose his right to vote, which had just been reinstated due to a new law. We talked with union families and families from low income neighborhoods. In conversation after conversation, the war in Iraq came up as a major issue and source of discontent. In one particular interaction, the person I met told me he was constantly singled out at work and on the defensive because of his views on the war and how good it was to meet people who felt the same way he did. He is getting in touch with the Driving Votes Las Vegas committee right now.

Sometimes perhaps you do have to drive twelve hours to Nevada so that you and the people you meet can realize that there are more of us out there than we might think who believe that what is going on right now is not okay. And through these experiences, people are finding each other, these conversations are being had, and ever increasingly, people are stepping forward and doing something about it.

Drawing the Line

In December of 2001 my father handed me an article by the conservative Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly, who was killed fifteen and a half months later in a Humvee accident while traveling as a reporter with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq. His column was a sarcastic congratulation to Allison Hornstein, a Yale undergraduate, for arriving at the conclusion that the actions of the September 11th terrorists were morally wrong. Allison had written a piece in Newsweek in which she relayed that as students on the Yale campus attempted to understand the motives and causes behind the terrorists’ actions, conspicuously absent was any discussion of wrongdoing. As Allison explained, the downside of her generation’s schooling in moral and cultural relativity was a resulting collective difficulty with making moral judgments.

I identified with Allison. As someone whose education was also filled with lessons in tolerance and respect for cultural differences, there is a resistance in me to passing moral judgment on the actions of others. My first instinct is rather to attempt to pinpoint where “the other side” is coming from and then to arrive at an understanding that our experiences, motivations, and opinions are just different, a sort of complacent nihilism wherein no one and nothing is ever right or wrong.

I go through these motions when I consider politics and the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq. While I certainly don’t agree with much of what our country has done in the Middle East and in fact experience a feeling of revulsion over the steps our government has taken since September 11th, I still have the initial inclination to: 1) Investigate differences in opinion, 2) Understand differences, 3) Conclude it’s all good.

As Michael Kelly pointed out, the problem with this train of thought is that sometimes actions are morally wrong. Hijacking planes, sending them into buildings, and killing thousands of civilians is morally wrong. I would add that lying to the nation and the world about the certainty of a threat and the credibility of the intelligence behind it is morally wrong. Unilaterally invading a sovereign nation based upon these trumped up charges and killing thousands of civilians is morally wrong. Waiving the human rights of suspected criminals and implementing torture is morally wrong.

But wait, the empathizer in me cries out. George Bush means well, Dick Cheney thinks he has the best interests of the Iraqi people in mind, and Donald Rumsfeld just wants to make the world safer. While this may be true, it may also be true that years of poverty and the U.S. government’s capricious application of justice in the Middle East have contributed to a growing hatred of the West by many Muslims. Does this absolve the September 11th terrorists? Hardly. Can I excuse my government for its lies, killing, and condoning of torture because of its supposed good intentions? I don’t think so.

I have to go through too many degrees of rationalization to even be comfortable with, let alone support, the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq, and particularly in an election year, I don’t have that much time. It is up to each one of us to pass moral judgment with our vote. “Draw the line, Ms. Hornstein,” I hear Mr. Kelly urging. “Draw it where you know it belongs.”

Project for Whose New American Century?

The day I finally realized I was never going to hear my voice or the voices of my peers resonating within the Bush administration was the day I learned about the Project for the New American Century. Call it na�ve or euphemistically, optimistic, but I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, almost half of all voters in 2000 had voted for George Bush and I know that at heart we are a good people who mean well, and besides, they were throwing around words like freedom and democracy and liberation. I was willing to believe that they actually intended to serve some greater good, albeit entirely misguidedly, by invading Iraq against the will of a large number of their citizens and the United Nations. I played games of guesswork and rationalization in which I let them come out on top and wrote off my fears and doubts.

This day of realization came during early March of last year in the weeks building up to the invasion of Iraq, when heated emails were flying back and forth and all anyone could talk about in San Francisco was the potential for war. I received a forward from a friend with a link to a website decrying, “Cheney’s Monstrous Scheme.” It was one of those sites that is seemingly based upon some kernel of truth that has caused the author to completely freak out and unfortunately cloud whatever information it may contain with a lefty conspiracy-theorist tinge. However, one organization’s name stood out and after a quick internet search, I was staring at the official site of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

As it turned out, PNAC (as I’ll refer to it from here on) is a conservative foreign policy think-tank formed back in 1997, many of whose founders have since risen to power positions in the Bush administration, notably Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, among others. In their statement of principles they outline their mission to build upon the "military investments and foreign policy achievements" of past administrations to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests. In their minds, the assurance of continued U.S. global dominance depends upon “a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad, and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities.”

In a policy paper entitled "Rebuilding America’s Defenses," they elaborate upon four core missions for U.S. military forces:

Defend the American homeland.
Fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars.
Perform the "constabulary" duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions.
Transform U.S. forces to exploit the "revolution in military affairs."

Pause. Go back. Reread.

Fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars.

They were planning on wars.

Other points include maintaining nuclear strategic superiority, increasing the military and defense spending, developing and deploying global missile defenses, creating the U.S. Space Forces to control space and cyberspace (no joke)… I could go on but you get the point. And that was the moment when it hit me, when I knew it was certain what I had only worried before was true: that no number of protesters in the streets, no number of letters to the editor and to politicians, no number of counter-arguments from the U.N. was going to stop Bush from bombing Iraq.

This was a war machine that was in the works long before I even knew it, and why would I have? PNAC’s ideology, which I could now see had unmistakably shaped the Bush administration’s foreign policy, was not a clear part of their platform during the Bush 2000 campaign. The PNAC founders themselves knew it wouldn’t be popular: “Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today…” Theirs was a Cold War mentality with a worldview strikingly different from mine and that of my peers.

In our generation, many of us were raised in educational environments that emphasized the importance of respect for other cultures and tolerance for those who may seem different from us. We have come of age in an era of globalization. We are obsessed with travel. We have friends from other countries. Many of us have been to other countries on exchange programs and university semesters abroad. Many of us speak other languages. We are excited about our world and our neighbors and hungry to learn more about each other.

The view of the world implicit in the Project for the New American Century is of a dangerous place with threats lurking in every corner and in every corner a potential conquest. While its founders seem to believe we would all be safer were we to follow their plan and militarize our planet and our skies, a byproduct of their mechanism is a public that is scared out of its wits by each other: Look at your neighbor and see her as the other. Look at that country and see it as the enemy.

Though I disagree with their worldview, it would be ingenuous of me not to acknowledge that there are threats to our personal safety out there. As someone who lost a family friend on September 11th, 2001, I know this all too well. However, it is possible to address these threats without resorting to war-hawking and imperialism. To do so, it is necessary to build a foreign policy based upon mutual respect and cooperation among nations, especially in matters of war, rather than one rooted in empire and violence. I want my leaders to reflect this reality and to be responsive to the people they are supposed to be representing, and not to use one of the narrowest margins of victory in presidential election history as a mandate to advance an extremist agenda. To appropriate the language of the PNAC founders, "we are in danger of squandering the opportunity" for a more peaceful world built upon the achievements in tolerance of past decades: a generation that is willing to globally look each other in the eye.

I am no longer so na�ve or optimistic about the Bush administration. In just under four years they have further divided our nation, divided nations from each other, and brought on a steady military and civilian death toll, amid other unenviable accomplishments. That is why participating in this election is so important, because the world that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz envision, and are attempting to construct, is not one that I want to live in, and it is up to each one of us to create the world that we know is possible.