In retrospect, it seems fitting to me that the first presidential candidate I worked for was one who reminded me so much of my own father--a teacher, a veteran, a family man and, above all, a man who believed that a great nation never ceases to embrace change, and that politics could rise above the dirt and become the means to an far better end.
Until the advent of Barack Obama, George McGovern was the closest thing I experience to having my father run for president. Which is part of why his crushing loss hurt so much, even though the polls more or less braced me for it. In part, it was because it was my first campaign, although, on the bright side, it did brace me for the reality that you can't win 'em all, and, in part, it was because it was because the outcome gave Richard Nixon, then the Darth Vader of American politics, a ratification and glorification he did not deserve (and, in the end, one that he through away through his craven criminality).
But McGovern's loss hurt so much, most of all, because it felt like a rejection of every life lesson my father had taught me up to that point. Reason trumps emotion. Progress is inevitable, as is change, and the former must be sought as an antidote to the latter. We are stronger together than when we stand alone.
Where in a 49-state landslide was there any sign that America believed in any of this?
And yet, McGovern's life after 1972 shows how you deal with the rejection of your ideals and values. Mainly, and above all, you don't give up.
The loss to Nixon was not the only loss that McGovern endured. He lost his Senate seat in 1980, he lost his wife and two of his children, he made another and even less successful run for the Presidency in 1984, and he tried his hand as a businessman, with less than successful results.
But he never stopped working to advance the cause of world peace, and of ending world hunger. He remained a believer that politics could make progress possible, and that it was essential for it to do so. And he did so in the face of constant, childish sneering from the other side of the political fence, primarily from people whose lives do not even reflect a fraction of McGovern's accomplishments.
If there is one lesson for progressives, especially young ones, to take from Senator McGovern's death, it should be the remembrance that the things we hold dear are both too valuable and too essential to walk away from. They cannot be accomplished in a day, or even a lifetime. They can only be accomplished by men and women who define themselves by their ideals, and not by their setbacks.
And so, to the millions of young people who worked so hard and so valiantly for Obama four years ago, and who have had their first bitter taste of the compromising nature of politics, I challenge and invite you to follow the late Senator's example. Hold on to your values, don't give up fighting, remember to seek a better world and not a perfect one, and never forget that politics will come to seek out you and your life, even if you want to run away from it. Far better to face it on your own terms, and make your mark on it. You may look at a given Presidential race as a choice between the lesser of two evils. But to run away from that choice is to invite the victory of the greater evil.
Rest in peace, Senator, along with my father. Both of you, to borrow from Arthur Conan Doyle's tombstone, were steel true and blade straight.
And may that be said of the rest of us, once we too have finished striving to make a great nation a greater one.
No comments:
Post a Comment