Monday, May 12, 2008
On Election Day 1972 I truly believed that if we could get out the vote, McGovern would win. I believe the same thing this year. But now we really have a chance.
Oct 15, 2004 | On Election Day 1972, I hit the streets of the college town in Maryland where I was -- in the loosest sense of the word -- going to college, to help get out the vote for George McGovern. The polls were not -- what's the word? -- encouraging, but deep in my heart I believed that we would overcome. I don't think I was in denial -- the way that President Bush is these days, shouting from podiums about how well things are going in Iraq -- I was simply hopeful. And believe me, left to my own devices, hope is not my first response. But I had become part of a great movement pledged to the belief that we could stop an immoral war, that we could take care of our nation's poor, that every person counted the same. I also just couldn't believe that reasonable folks would pull the lever for Nixon. People had hated him since the '40s. He was as repellent and stubborn as Bush is, although much smarter, and not as certain that he had crawled into God's brain and was seeing the world through His eyes.
I was 18 years old. Maryland was beautiful in the fall, about to get cold, with a bit of snow, but in the meantime, the autumn leaves were still on the maples and dogwoods. The state was a bit of a challenge for a leftie from California -- for instance, George Wallace had won the Democratic primary there. But everyone I knew loved McGovern. And I'd just read the second of two books that changed my life. The first was Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling," which precipitated my stepping forward into a tentative faith. The second was "I and Thou," by Martin Buber.
If you went to college in the '70s, even as briefly as I did, you probably encountered "I and Thou." But in case you didn't, the book is a passionate call to cast off the standard way of the world, which is to see others in an I-It relationship. In the I-It stance, you related to others as members of categories, or as a chess player would, as objects to move about in a way that increases your sense of power. I am not going to name names, but I-It is the way that, say, hypothetically, fascists or oil companies might view ordinary citizens. But the I-Thou relationship meant you saw and respected each person, were committed to each person's well-being. The word "Thou" is so intimate, and suggests holiness. It says, You are precious to me, and I am going to relate to you with that sense of preciousness. I-Thou is in play when parents first meet their babies, or when King David stopped seeing Bathsheba as a plaything, an It, and grieved with her when their baby died. I-Thou is the nurse at the Vietnam Memorial holding a dead soldier.
"I and Thou" propelled a few of us progressives to set up a McGovern desk in front of the student union building, even when the polls and my hangovers were so terrible. It helped me come to believe that the Democrats again were a party who, at the core, tried to respect and include and care for all people. I had been flirting with socialism for part of the previous year, but made a decision to come back to the fold because I was pretty sure that only the Democrats could make the nation better. "Pretty sure" is about as clear as my spiritual understanding gets, but as with electricity, you don't need to understand it to use it.
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