BY DANIEL PAK

Online | August 29, 2008

Some questions have been lingering in my mind since Obama’s speech and the diversity workshops that I had last night. I went to msn.com and saw a poll about whether Obama’s speech last night earned people’s votes. About 61% said yes but about 21% said no, saying that his speech was mostly style and show with no firm substance.

So I present this question: Is Obama simply a celebrity or is there substance to his words? I mean his speech was amazing last night, and he described all the changes that he would make. I absolutely agreed wholeheartedly on many of the points that he made about the American promise, particularly his assertion that while government is not your babysitter, its job is to create opportunities for Americans. Personal responsibility is not always enough to ensure one’s wellbeing; it takes a government to generate the kinds of opportunities that enterprising citizens can seize as leverage for their own success.

But as much as I would like to believe that he will be able to do all he says he will do, I’m still a little skeptical. The word “change” carries such ambiguous connotations and everyone defines the word differently. We really don’t know what is going to happen in the future and whether or not Obama will keep all of the promises he made in last night’s speech. But we should also not, as responsible citizens, pin all of our hopes on government or on a single man.

Another question that I had after the diversity workshops last night pertains to Swarthmore’s trademark “liberalism." Swarthmore is a place that fosters intellectual discussion, not a place that shuns it. Discussion are much better when people disagree about their basic beliefs. These disagreements should not be paths to hatred but a starting point for discussion and possibly even friendship.

Yes, there are definitely some beliefs that you can loathe your neighbor for, but loathing your neighbor for his or her political beliefs sounds a bit…yeah. So maybe Swarthmore, instead of having a reputation for being hard-core liberal, can have a reputation for simply being open. Having read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” I realize that the words “liberal” and “conservative” and “democrat” and “republican” carry arbitrarily assigned connotations. Right now, everything that isn’t Bush is “liberal," which has become synonymous with “Democratic” and “Obama.” Everything that is Bush is “conservative,” a virtual synonym for “McCain." It seems that Bush did at least a few things right during his presidency, as an edition of Newsweek suggests. Rather than view the political field in terms of binaries and pigeonhole candidates as representatives of one ideological pole or the other, we should be evaluating candidates as the sum of their actions — not all of which may fall under the simplistic terminologies of “liberal” and “conservative.”

« RETURN TO OPINIONS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »