"AMERICA" Bookshelves are filled with advice on how to change ourselves--our looks, weight, clothes, spouses, kids, pets--and on how we live, how we think, and how to do life again. How does a country change itself ? How does a world? If some big realities about a country or about the world change and if old, ineffective ways don''t work any longer, what do we do then? To find an answer, for Canadians, it is instructive to look at the United States and Obama, and to the climate-change debate. We live in a world where destruction is easy. Not just wholesale destruction by nuclear bombs, for example, but the killing of hundreds, if not thousands, by simple but deadly materials that cost almost nothing and can be put together in a basement or a shed. Where once this capacity for destruction had taken a country to afford its cost, to do its science, to deliver its blow, where once it had taken an army to unleash its devastating power, it now takes only one person who believes in something just as strongly as does a nation of a few hundred million and who feels his or her belief is no less worthy because he or she is only one person. This person may also believe that killing the right people in this life will lead to a better life for all eternity, while many of those he or she is fighting don''t believe in a life after this life and need to squeeze every possible second out of this one. One person has everything to gain; another has everything to lose. We live in a world where we can no longer get away from one another.
There is no mountain or desert or ocean that can''t be crossed; no wall built high enough, no fortress so fully defended, no political or economic boundary that can protect us. Information and viruses travel freely, as does envy and resentment. We can no longer isolate ourselves within our own language, culture, or religion. It is not possible to imagine transforming everyone else to make them just like us. No one is going to conquer the world. The only way is to listen, discuss, learn, respect, negotiate, compromise, work together. There is no way out but to get along. We live in a world of nearly 7 billion people, a population that can sustain itself only as long as many millions die each year of malnutrition and many millions more of preventable diseases, as long as hundreds of millions have a life expectancy of less than fifty years, and as long as several billion don''t insist on living, or don''t have the capacity to live, a Western middle-class life.
What if the 2.5 billion people of China and India, twice the population of Europe and North America combined, were to have this capacity and insisted on living a Western lifestyle? Environmentally, we could not sustain the possibility--the planetary math doesn''t work. Yet year after year, we see both China''s and India''s capacity grow, we see that insistence increase--there are now 10 million cars in China, up from fewer than 1 million just eight years ago--and we see that destruction escalate too. We live on a planet that was not made for--or even made especially for--human beings. A mere shift of three degrees in the world''s temperature--from 14°C to 17°C or -24°C to -21°C--a change not great enough to make us take off or put on a sweater--could melt glacier ice; alter evaporation and precipitation patterns; change ocean currents and atmospheric air flows; reduce available water for human consumption, agriculture, and energy use; generate more violent hurricanes and other extremes of weather and, in fact, more extremes of all kinds--floods, droughts, fires, diseases; and create deserts, destroy rain forests, and raise water levels. In short, this temperature shift would cause disruption, increase stress on people and structures, and generate more and more unknowns--turning a life we know how to live, even if it wasn''t always desirable, into a life we don''t know how to live. Only three degrees. Human beings appeared on this planet only in the last 2.
5 million years, which in Earth-time is hardly a blink ago. For almost all those years, we didn''t matter much. We were only a few million in number. We weren''t large or strong. We didn''t dominate our landscape like a saber-toothed tiger, woolly mammoth, or bison did. We lived only a few years. We were only one of countless other species--like an otter or a parrot. For all but the last few hundred years, our existence on Earth has been modest.
Other living beings had greater muscular power--they were able to run faster and longer and overpower their prey--or had greater physical weapons--bigger teeth, stronger jaws, powerful claws. Others could see or hear or sense far better. Not long ago, we developed our own greater power--to think--and with that to create memory, learn, conceive of the future, work together, plan, and make tools to do work that had once been beyond our capacity. We developed this greater power sufficiently to allow us to live longer, do more, make more, have more--and also to cut down, build over, pollute, and kill off other species, bringing about their extinction. As human beings, we are able to live for our own convenience, to create weapons of mass destruction, to change our climate, to put life at risk. How does a world change its story? How does a country? This is what U.S. president Barack Obama was talking about during his 2008 election campaign.
He didn''t ask the American people the question that all political challengers ask, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" He asked them, instead, to stop and look around at America itself: "Is this the real America we see?" The war in Iraq? Torture? Health care that has no room for tens of millions of citizens? The exaggerated wealth and the exaggerated poverty and the exaggerated gap between them--is that what the United States stands for? Is this the American dream? Is the purpose of all this freedom and liberty only to accumulate more and more and more? More and bigger cars, more food, more things, more than Americans can use, more than they even care about, more than is good for them--as people, as a society, as a planet. This obesity of body, mind, and spirit that has crept into their lives and seems unstoppable. "Is this the real America we see?" Obama asked the American people. "No," he answered. "We are better than this." More than being about economic prosperity, national security, the environment, or even justice or fairness, Obama''s message during the campaign was about "America": "the land of the free and the home of the brave," "the land of opportunity," the "melting pot" for the world''s peoples. "America": that special place of forever new frontiers--geographical, intellectual--of forever optimism, forever possibility, and forever becoming. The United States is a physical place; "America" is a place of the heart and of the imagination.
"America," Obama was saying, is their best story and their right story. And what makes "America" special is not its separation of powers and checks and balances, it is not its separation of church and state, or even its frontier. What makes "America" special is its "specialness," that instinct and capacity always to do the important and necessary thing when it needs to be done. To reinvent itself, to be able and willing to go off in new, amazing directions, yet always to stay at the centre, still to be "America." Because the world changes, what is important and necessary is not the same at every moment. What made the United States special during the twentieth century, in the last age of empire, was its overwhelming economic and military power. The United States used its abundant resources, more abundant than anyone else''s, to make things the world would come to want. It made weapons that could win hot wars and cold wars.
And because being bigger, richer, and more powerful had made the United States special, it seemed to most Americans that being bigger, richer, and more powerful was what special was. The United States kept on being that America in Vietnam, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It continued to be that America in creating suvs and sub-prime mortgages. It kept on being that America even as the world community was shaking its head, wondering where "America" had gone. All this came to a disastrously clear focus with George W. Bush, who, with his blue jeans, Texas ranch, and love of baseball, was the most American yet least "American" of all presidents--in image, a Teddy Roosevelt but a century out of time. The world had changed; what defined "specialness" had changed; and what America needed to do to be "America" had changed. George W.
Bush hadn''t noticed. Now we live in a global community in which no one country, not even the United States, is big enough or strong enough economically or militarily to control and dominate. In a global community, specialness is not the Iraq War or suvs; specialness is being smart enough to see the ice caps melting and to know that the age of carbon is coming to a close. It is being smart enough to launch "America" into "the next thing," as if on a mission to the moon, to develop new benign energies, to restructure the economy, to change the way people live. It is being smart enough to change our relationship with the planet and with other nations and peoples, to get along with others, to get along with the planet, to get ahead and to stay ahead, yet to bring along others in the task. And "America" is about succeeding. In "America," you don''t just say something, you do it, and there is always a way. That is not optimism.
That is not Obama''s legendary hopefulness. That is "America," and that is Obama''s own life.