Is It Time to Say Good-bye to Afghanistan?

istanWith Osama bin Laden dead, it is worth asking if now is the time for the United States to get out of Afghanistan. President Obama, however, has shown no sign of wavering from his commitment to delivering basic security and a functioning central government to Afghanistan.

Many have been slow to notice, but the president does not easily give up on his objectives and even less so on his commitments. Still, bin Laden’s death might give added momentum to a search for a negotiated end to the war.
Even before bin Laden’s death, a consensus appeared to be emerging that the war in Afghanistan could not be ended by military action alone. Negotiations with the Taliban are increasingly seen as a key part, perhaps the key part, in ending the war. There are, however, reasons to be skeptical of talks with the Taliban, especially when those talks are seen as the key to ending the war.
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A Politics of the Profound

This last week we have witnessed what may be the story of the year or even the decade. The dramatic scenes across North Africa and especially Egypt have captured the world's attention and reminded us of the vast scale of politics. Might this be the dawning of a new moment in the Muslim world, or will the protests give way to repression or extremism? 

Domestically these events have humbled all but the most partisan or idealistic. Different members of the Obama administration have issued their cautious statements, appropriately circumspect before what may be a historic moment.

Egypt has dwarfed all other events, including the administration's post-State of the Union media blitz. The State of the Union now looks rather paltry, but then so does most of our politics – when they are not sounding overwrought.

Perhaps this is as it should be in the day-to-day, but the State of the Union is not just any other day. It is one of those high holy days in politics, a national ritual that reminds us that politics deals with the profound.

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King the Pastor

This year Martin Luther King Day feels different to me, more serious and alive, but also more complicated. On the one hand my thoughts keep drifting back to Tucson, worrying that we may be re-entering a tragic chapter of our history in which a generation of leaders was taken from us all too soon.  This is not the 60s, but I can’t help but worry about where we are headed. I worry about our leaders and the hateful rhetoric hurled at them, and I pray that God will keep them safe. 

Martin Luther King would want us to take it a step further: to heed God’s call to boldly confront hate, to take creative action. The problem is that this doesn’t feel like the time for marches or boycotts or protests. It feels like the time for unity, prayers, and talk of how we can work together. In this time we need to hear from King the pastor, the one who cared for souls, both in his congregation and in the larger civil rights struggle. This is the King who preached funerals for the movement’s martyrs.  In wake of Tucson, one thinks of the eulogy he delivered for the four young girls murdered by the bomber of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. There the stakes were clear and dramatic, and King was direct in urging those gathered to avoid bitterness: “So in spite of the darkness of this hour we must not despair. We must not become bitter; nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence.” 

In Tucson President Obama seemed to be channeling King, calling us to rise above the seething resentments of our politics.  “The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better,” Obama said, and then recalling Christina Taylor Green, “I want to live up to her expectations.  I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it.  I want America to be as good as she imagined it.  All of us -– we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.” 

Tucson is not Birmingham. In Birmingham King faced a well-organized terrorist movement committed to racist ideology in service to a Caucasian identity.  In Tucson the victims were shot by a crazed gunman whose motivations are still being determined.

In both cases, however, the attacks were felt more widely and they served to prompt the question of how to respond to the attacks, both personally and politically. This is where we most need to hear King’s wisdom that the greatest weapon against violence is not hate, but love.

King’s idea of love is a long way from contemporary notions celebrating love as an attraction that may come or go. He thought of love not simply as a feeling but as a virtue that depended not on the recipient’s appeal, but on the giver’s settled disposition. This word, giver, gets at King’s idea of love with its deep roots in the biblical notion of agape. The key to this form of love, as demonstrated by Jesus and Gandhi, is its strength, its stubborn refusal to yield to hate, indifference, or any of the other vices that would separate us from one another.  While racism is bound up with the urge to segregate, King understood love to be devoted to the creation of the beloved community in which all members are cherished as children of God.

In the aftermath of Tucson many of us feel a deep longing for some hint that together we might build something more than the fractious, hurried, and brutal society we fear we are becoming. King’s inspiring life and heroic death remind us that aspirations are not actions and that dreams are worth little unless they inspire a new reality. King offers us more, much more, than calls for a kinder and gentler society. I do not mean to criticize civility, far from it, but civility on its own is not enough. The duty of self-restraint is no match for the passion of politics. If civility is to endure for more than a season, it must be wedded to the virtue of love. As King said so many times, love can heal the broken; it can even transform enemies into friends.

In our time of 24-hour news cycles and professional provocateurs, we may think this naive, but neither the smallness nor meanness of our politics can defeat agape any more than Bull Connor could defeat King and his army of children.  It is those martyrs we remember today (not Connor), and it they who remind us that we are called to be witnesses to a love stronger than hate. 

A holiday gift: principled civility?

This holiday season, there’s a special feeling in the air — acrimony.

It radiates from Washington, where almost everyone seems to feel betrayed by the tax deal or the angry reaction to it. Liberal Democrats complain loudest, but clearly, President Barack Obama is irritated by the left’s furious second-guessing. Republicans have also found a way to take offense — certainly at the president’s analogy of negotiating with hostage takers. If they are kidnappers, what are the House Democrats?

 

We are a long way from the new Washington that both Obama and his predecessor promised. But perhaps this is a gift of the lame-duck Congress: the reminder that all should abandon dreams of post-partisan politics and return to the core values of his or her party. Civility is important, but in politics — as in life — it is no substitute for a political party’s fidelity to its core ideals.

Read the rest of the post at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46502.html

Longing for a Messiah

A recent survey by Gallup shows that only one in 4 Americans thinks has Congress accomplished more than usual this year. Given the high number of significant pieces of legislation, Gallup wonders aloud why this might be:

This question is particularly relevant this year because the current Democratically controlled Congress has passed a series of high-profile legislative bills, including the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and others. Nevertheless, the large majority of Americans do not perceive that what Congress has accomplished is more than it has done in previous years.

They point to the obvious reasons, beginning with partisan differences over what a significant piece of legislation is. Politics is an arena in which values and loyalties clearly shape how we see the world.  There's nothing unusual about this, except its extent.  Many Republicans see Obama (and his allies) as a kind of anti-Christ.  One might insert a number of other despised titles here, but "Anti-Christ" gets at the supposed hidden purposes of Obama that animates so many Americans.

The term "anti-Christ" is also helpful because on the flip side are or were the rather large expectations of Obama supporters, many of whom are now disaffected.  For them, Obama was a messianic figure who promised to remake the country, so much so that all signs of the their anti-Christ, George Bush, would be completely removed.

For some of these folks, Congress is to blame for Obama's "failures." I tend to think there's something to this, but Congress has almost never been as "sexy" as the office of President. This is true even of those Presidents almost totally lacking in charisma. The rare exception means the President has screwed up royally--think Watergate and Tricky Dick.  

It has almost always been easier for us to get excited about one leader than about a group of leaders, especially one representing a diverse and contentious bunch like us, the American people.  In today’s culture of celebrity, there is good reason to believe that Congress is destined to be overlooked and downright despised, even in a year of significant achievement. 

Beneath this is the reality that the recent laws and their effects are not radical in nature.  For one thing, they take time to go into effect, often by design. This is especially the case with the health insurance reform act, but it is true with other pieces of significant legislation as well.  Once in effect, however, we are likely to hear only faint praise for even the positive effects, because the effects are reformist in nature. As significant as some of them are—and there are some very important reforms, they do not serve to remake our landscape into a place we no longer recognize. 

In light of our economic troubles, this is a recipe for political disaster. If the Republicans do not win both the House and the Senate, they will have failed. In an era of over-sized personalities, partisanship, and expectations, we long for a political messiah that will remake our society in some shape or fashion. The Tea Party folks claim they want their country back. Progressives want the truly tolerant, multi-cultural America they can see in the distance (in the form of projections). As different as the visions are, they both speak to a longing for BOLD political action or at least they think they do. It may be that what they really speak to are the range of frustrations our society feels with these changing, troubled times. We long for the stability of the familiar and the justice of tomorrow.

But we are still living in the wake of bold, even rash action. It was bold action that led us not just into Afghanistan but also Iraq after we had approved massive budget-busting tax cuts. Our very different visions of CHANGE strongly suggest that our political representatives will continue to struggle along, fighting over our visions and occasionally settling for pragmatic compromises, at least until a new consensus emerges.

I wonder if this would have struck the Founders (and their generation) as such a bad thing. It was they, after all, who set up this democratic system with it checks and balances, including a central place for the legislative branch. The great difference between them and us on these matters is that they believed that this a bold experiment. We "know better" and instead long for a messiah to deliver us from such labors.

Might it be that what we need is not a bold political savior, but the courage and self-control to engage in the messy business of politics?