My State of the Union Address

It was a snowy November in Woodstock Vermont in 1973 and I was sitting at a large Thanksgiving dinner. Beside me was seated a gentleman who had been a law professor of Richard Nixon’s. Directly opposite me sat Roderick Macleish, the NBC news commentator for Washington DC and a nightly Nixon critic. The topic was the precarious legal and moral precipice on which the presidency of America swayed. I had recently graduated from college and started teaching high school in a gang dominated section of New York. I was having difficulty resolving the idealism of college with the realities before me.

I celebrated Thanksgiving 2008 amid the excitement and anticipation of the recent election results. It had taken over two hundred years for our nation to have a woman and a black man vying for the presidential nomination. As I eagerly awaited the swearing in of Barack Obama I felt it was a new day for America.

Sadly, the news was not entirely positive. Greed, it turns out, is not good. No one had wanted to question the hidden price of profit. Many people had noted that Bernie Madoff had to be doing something illegal because no one else could duplicate the profits he offered investors. Yet no one wanted to challenge the goose that was laying the golden eggs. One can’t pull off a fifty-billion dollar scam unless many regulators choose to look the other way.

Obama inherited the hangover from a decade long party of irresponsibility and excess. Lending practices (that sound illegal but highly lucrative) resulted in over one million people losing their home in 2008. Homeowners had made thousands, often hundreds of thousands, riding the wave of home prices. “They aren’t making any more land and the price of lumber isn’t going down…the price of housing must rise forever,” a realtor pointed out. It sounded right. Just as Obama entered office the wave of real estate profits had become a tsunami of foreclosures and homelessness.

But failing banks, homeless Americans and a dollar so weak only the Chinese wanted any weren’t the worst of it. Bin Laden was still training terrorists and airport security appeared to be chronically insecure. One could accuse Obama of misreading the entire situation when he decided that in the midst of all of this chaos he should put all his chips behind national health-care, the political Medusa that had bitten every politician that went near it. I can’t be critical about that decision. I want to believe he is so moral he could not be president of a nation that ignores the sick and believes health-care is a privilege, not a right. I want to believe he was wise enough to know there was never going to be a better time than the present to tackle the issue.

It’s been thirty-five years since that snowy Thanksgiving and for the first time I feel I have a President who is as idealistic as I am. Tomorrow he’s scheduled to tell us the state of the Union, as if our situation is not painfully obvious. We’re up to here in poo and there is a possibility we have elected a genuine leader.