Thursday, November 13, 2008

Flipping Channels

Here’s something I've just noticed about myself in the last few days: Unconsciously since the election, I've been tuning in to national news. For years, I flipped past CNN and MSNBC, and the other “news” channels. I didn't care and I don’t think I wanted to know what was happening in Washington. For the last eight years there has been nothing inspiring in any of the decision-making at the national level. I was resigned to being a citizen of a nation whose policies and priorities differed markedly from my own sensibilities. There was nothing I could do about it, and since I am not one to criticize from the sidelines, I just didn’t bother to stay tuned in.

I was determined to come to Micronesia ~ Pohnpei, Guam, Saipan ~ as much to get away from the States as to broaden my horizons and seek adventure. I was in Alabama before and after the Clinton years, and the antipathy toward him in particular and Democrats in general supersaturated my working environment in the Alabama Attorney General’s Office where my supervisors and many of my new colleagues were conservatives and neo-Republicans. People I had to work closely with seized on every opportunity to vent their animosity at Democrats, liberals and libertarians in visceral often venomous ways. Politics and national policy wasn’t business; it was personal. And there was rarely anything rational about it that I could ascertain. On May 1, 1992, Rodney King asked “Can we just get along?” and the answer from then until just recently appeared to be “No. Quit asking.” Living in the United States was worse than living in a dysfunctional family. It had become toxic.

I became an expatriate, an expat, not just in its sense as a noun, “one who has taken up residence in a foreign country,” but more in its verb sense, “to withdraw (oneself) from residence in one's native country,” or as an adjective, “voluntarily absent from home or country.” To be sure, Guam, a U.S. Territory, and Saipan, in a U.S. Commonwealth, are definitely part of the United States; but we are very far away, and since U.S. citizens who permanently reside in the Territory of Guam or the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands cannot vote for president, or any other national office except to send one non-voting delegate each to Congress, what happens in Washington is something over which we have very little influence, let alone control. For the most part, I didn’t have a voice in it, and frankly I couldn’t be happier that those who did were thousands and thousands of miles away.

I didn’t want to hear it. Even in local races, Guam, where I live, seemed entirely free of the kind of personal acrimony that attends the political campaigns and arguments I witnessed among friends and acquaintances in Alabama and elsewhere in the States. Not only did I not have to smile politely at people promoting this candidate or bad-mouthing that one, I didn’t have to deal with any of it. So I had no reason to keep up with it in the national news. When I counted my blessings, not living anywhere in the continental United States during an election year has been very near the top of my list these past five years.

But ever since the presidential election, I've been feeling … I don’t know … interested again, even, may I say, eagerly expectant to see what the president-elect will do to reverse the course of the last eight years with respect to the wars, the economy, education, tax equity, health care, the environment, and civil rights in the wake of 911. I almost dare to hope that America may someday be in a position to lead the world by example again in a way I can be proud of. I know it’s early. And I’m no Pollyanna. While I find the comparisons to past presidents interesting from an intellectual point of view, it is much too early to say that our next president is or will be the next Lincoln or Roosevelt or Kennedy. I know that.

I mentioned to a very special someone the other night that if I were ever asked to return to the States to serve in Washington, I might be hard-pressed to say “no.” A month ago, I would not have thought twice before declining an invitation to return to the States anywhere. Thankfully, I’m not looking for a job, and I am fully committed to my life here in Guam, Where America’s Day Begins. But nowadays without even thinking about it, I linger just a little longer on the news when flipping channels. Rodney King’s plea for us to all just get along may have been a bit ambitious before. Not so much today.

© Copyright 2008 Robert M. Weinberg. All Rights Reserved