Obama’s victory last night was more than just a victory against Bush politics and everything that went wrong over the past eight years. And, it wasn’t just about the declining economy that some Americans feel won’t get resolved inside a McCain Administration. What Obama brings to the table is more than just the hope that every network and newspaper talks about. And, more than change.
Obama allows us for the first time in a very long time to feel again. He stirs up passion in all of us, even those who fear him, whether it’s the color of his skin, or that they actually believe he’s an Arab terrorist or the Anti-Christ.
It is passion, drive, the entrepreneurial spirit and the belief that anything is possible that made America what it was for our pioneering forefathers and is for us, today. Leaving a known world behind and trekking half way across the world to a new land was not for the fearful. The fearful never left. Those who made the decision had strength, endurance, passion, spirit and yes, faith. Their belief system was different than those they left behind; they created rather than merely lived the life they were given. They decided to create their future; not doing so would be internal death.
Creation. Passion. Living in a world driven by hope, faith, spirit and unity rather than fear, mistrust and greed – isn’t that the way we are all fundamentally designed at our core? In a world untouched by external forces (i.e., The Gods Must be Crazy), and if not faced with the need to survive, isn’t life so much more rewarding when we share, reach out, give something of ourselves to another person, another world?
But 2008 isn’t 1776 and America is indeed a different place. Today, America’s melting pot is much more than a chicken broth soup made up of northern Europeans. It’s vast and diverse with one subculture on top of another. Many fear each other and in other pockets, people embrace each other, try to learn from one another, and move forward in their lives in a positive way as a result of each encounter.
In this vast diverse new world, we meet Asian faces with southern accents, black faces with hybrid German/American accents, elderly Mexicans and Chinese who don’t speak a word of English and rely on their children for translation, first generation Indians who were heads of their class at Stanford and Yale, twenty year old Koreans running profitable companies — all of it here in this big country we call America.
The American family is no longer “Leave it to Beaver” or “The Lucy Show,” in black and white, nor is it the Katherine Hepburn looking mom with the floral apron she got from her mother which was passed down from her own. The average American mom doesn’t have time to bake cookies several times a week and the Shake-and-Bake boxes from the 1970s that were a godsend for busy moms have transitioned into a lifestyle that has become all about efficiency.
That efficient lifestyle paved the way for higher productivity, with two parents working and innovation moving at a pace we might be proud of, yet now, some of us are starting to ask ourselves: what’s the trade off? How do we keep up? Perhaps the Singularity really is upon us. Who can be sure? One thing is for sure. People around me are not just fed up with a declining economy or uncertain about what we’re doing in Iraq, but they’re overwhelmed with the lifestyle that the new America has created through our need to innovate and work ten hour days. All for the lifestyle of the American dream. As my international pals say: Americans live to work and we work to live.
Now it seems as if we are merely trying to keep up and make sense of it all.
For years, we tried to keep up with rising home prices, prices that even a higher than average wage cannot afford. We’re trying to keep up with rising medical insurance costs. As a healthy young woman I pay more than $7K a year in premiums with a $1K deductible on top of that and 30% co-pay after that’s done and they still try to get out of paying when they should. Do the math for a family of four or six.
We’re trying to make sense of the fact that we’ve been making tremendous innovations in technology over the past two decades, and yet most people I know spend more time trying to fix an electronic device, a cell phone or a computer. People spend hours on the phone with tech support with no resolution at the end of it or simply more time in front of a computer trying to manage the information overload that clutters their inbox or the multiple social networking accounts that they keep getting invites to.
Are these the things that truly make our lives richer and more meaningful? Where’s the physical human component? There seems to be less time for it because we’re so busy merely trying to keep up and make sense of it all. What about the kind of energy and gratitude you feel when you hug a small child or help a friend home after having her wisdom teeth removed because she can barely walk?
It feels as if our over-developed world has lost its balance along its journey to perfection. Innovation comes at a price. Working 15 hour days to make more money to afford that child’s college tuition because the costs are almost beyond each or to pay a mortgage you can barely afford, comes at a price.
The Republicans cling to this notion that somehow in a Democrat world, their American freedoms will be taken away, somewhere along the way, and government control will slow down their progress and successes. We as a nation will become socialist and taxes will go up.
During the transition between the old America and the new America, something happened. Along the way, many people stopped “feeling,” the kind of feeling you get when you experience life changing moments or the rain on your face and it somehow marks you for life. Your life is different because of it.
Every time I travel, Europeans and others around the world tell me about this emptiness they see in America, and those conversations have happened nearly everywhere in the world. This void. This void has come from too many years of consumerism and government feeding off people’s fears. We all know that the Republicans play on fear time and time again, so no surprise that they took the victory in the last election.
It’s 2008, and we are so worn from the lies and unhealthy decisions time and time again, the fact that we can’t keep up and make sense of it all, pushes us the other way. We NEED to hear the word hope again or what’s the point of going on?
In the past few months, countless people have asked me: “where will you go if McCain/Palin win?” assuming no other option but to leave the country if the result was anything other than what it was Tuesday night.
In the shower this morning after finishing another one of Andre Brink’s South African novels, I had a vision that threw Americans in different buckets. One bucket was the one we’ll call the FEAR bucket. The second bucket is the HOPE bucket, the third bucket the MONEY bucket and the fourth we’ll call the SECURITY bucket.
In the first bucket, I saw a bunch of Republicans running around. There were smart ones, those who have an affiliation to Israel and yet were fearful that somehow Obama would simply align with Iran and leave America and Israel unsafe rather than make an appropriately aggressive military move if needed. Other smart ones had different agendas: they weren’t racist or pro-life but they made a lot of money and siding with Obama somehow meant they’d have to share some of their wealth.
They feared we’d somehow become what Russia was a hundred years ago. “This is America. How can you vote a socialist in?” they’d ask me. Or something worse. In the same bucket are the born again Christians, the Mormons and the southern Baptists. The gun lovers, the rednecks, the cowboys and the farmers who live in the wide open plains of Wyoming and Texas. All of them blinded by the fact that our ability to breathe freely and “feel” are diminishing in a world of cookie-cutter Bush clones and “sameness” businessmen who think strip malls, fast food chains and Walmarts are the only way to go. These are the icons we’ll be remembered by because these are the icons that are starting to dominate, above our innovation, our passion and our hope.
In the HOPE bucket are where the creators have been forced to go because we really only have two parties to choose from. In this bucket are Americans who have been unfairly treated, they may be an underdog, a rebel, or of a different skin color.
There are those who may not be able to pay their bills anymore because of the way our economy has been managed for the past decade. There are serial entrepreneurs who can’t live another day watching Bush politics. They can’t live another day watching what is happening in Iraq and where our money is going.
They can’t live another day traveling to other parts of the world and watching our respect as a nation decline. In this bucket are devout Democrats as well as people who refuse to have their decisions and their behavior driven by fear. Then there are those who are starving to feel again because its been so long and they want to remember the experience. They ache to be proud of America again.
In the MONEY bucket are those who may vote either way, but their lives are defined by DRIVE and SUCCESS, success defined largely in an external world, whether it be a title, the letters they can put next to their names, the amount of money they have in the bank, the amount of power and influence they can command over another and so on. Some people in this bucket have remembered how to feel but most have set feeling aside to make money or the next new patent or invention. It’s a higher priority and therefore their primary driver.
In the SECURITY bucket are those who just want to be left alone. For the most part, they’re non-participants. They don’t really care about politics one way or another as long as it doesn’t affect them. They want a simple life, to mainly be unseen rather than seen, and to simply have enough to care for themselves and their family. These people don’t want to speak up or out and would rather the buzz behind the election itself simply go away completely. Obviously these are over simplified generalizations and people clearly live in more than one bucket, but in this election, these buckets felt more defined somehow and people gravitated to what they knew or they voted for hope.
Who knows what percentage of the country today are remnants of the pioneers of yesterday, our forefathers, the people who need to create and feel or suffer an internal death. They still exist, but a different America evolved along the way. A small percentage sits in the SECURITY and MONEY buckets and everyone else who is not in the HOPE bucket is driven by and live their lives in fear. Some hide behind those fears by shopping, others use violence, drugs, overeating and alcohol.
Another group hides behind puritanical or religious beliefs that may not even make sense to them, but they cling to those beliefs because they know no other way of being and these beliefs have become their identity and often the community’s identity they have subscribed to along the way. Leaving those beliefs behind forces them to take a step above and beyond where they’ve ever lived, a place they never dared to touch. That place haunts them. It feels lonely, secluded, confusing, and isolated and requires too much of them…..so they think. And so they too have stopped feeling but many don’t even realize it.
And now Obama. He represents hope, passion, energy, and for the first time in a long time, action. In a way, we feel as if we have voted for a leader that lets us return to the America our forefathers knew. A return to our primal selves. A client who was volunteering for Obama in Nevada said that they saw groups of people running as fast as they could at 6:30 pm on election night to make sure they made it to the polls in time. Others showed up who have never voted in their lifetime because they didn’t feel it would make a difference or they never believed in any of the candidates.
The journey ahead. I’m looking forward to the return to our primal selves. It’s the sort of thing I experience when I travel outside the country. I go on “walkabouts” when I feel suffocated by the workaholics, the over commercialism and me-ism that America has become so fixated on. Perhaps Obama can help us all return to our primal selves, the self that puts gratitude, respect, hard work, passion, giving and action at the core. Many of us hope so. It’s time to believe again and remember that we live in a country where everything is possible. That, my friends, is the country Americans want back.
Renee Blodgett is the founder of We Blog the World. The site combines the magic of an online culture and travel magazine with a global blog network and has contributors from every continent in the world. Having lived in 10 countries and explored nearly 80, she is an avid traveler, and a lover, observer and participant in cultural diversity.
She is also the CEO and founder of Magic Sauce Media, a new media services consultancy focused on viral marketing, social media, branding, events and PR. For over 20 years, she has helped companies from 12 countries get traction in the market. Known for her global and organic approach to product and corporate launches, Renee practices what she pitches and as an active user of social media, she helps clients navigate digital waters from around the world. Renee has been blogging for over 16 years and regularly writes on her personal blog Down the Avenue, Huffington Post, BlogHer, We Blog the World and other sites. She was ranked #12 Social Media Influencer by Forbes Magazine and is listed as a new media influencer and game changer on various sites and books on the new media revolution. In 2013, she was listed as the 6th most influential woman in social media by Forbes Magazine on a Top 20 List.
Her passion for art, storytelling and photography led to the launch of Magic Sauce Photography, which is a visual extension of her writing, the result of which has led to producing six photo books: Galapagos Islands, London, South Africa, Rome, Urbanization and Ecuador.
Renee is also the co-founder of Traveling Geeks, an initiative that brings entrepreneurs, thought leaders, bloggers, creators, curators and influencers to other countries to share and learn from peers, governments, corporations, and the general public in order to educate, share, evaluate, and promote innovative technologies.
