Thoughts On The September 12th Meeting
by Chris Bowers, Tue Sep 12, 2006 at 08:01:22 PM EST
This was an amazing day for me. I felt a tremendous swelling of patriotic pride and love for America when I attended this meeting. Here I was, with a group of my friends and colleagues, meeting with one of our nation's Presidents because our small, do-it-yourself political operation had drawn his attention. I mean, this is largely work I have completed and a movement to which I have contributed from the bedroom of my apartment in West Philly. Somehow, in only a few years, this resulted in meeting with a former President of the United States. As I was thinking about this, I quickly remembered that President Clinton attended a public high school Arkansas (as I did in Liverpool, New York), and rose to become President of the United States. And here we were, conversing with one another as citizens, overlooking the New York City skyline, which is quite possibly the greatest architectural achievement in the history of humanity. And we were doing it in a neighborhood, Harlem, which has never been particularly wealthy but whose residents produced some of the greatest works of art worldwide in the 20th century. It was a dizzying and remarkable moment that reminds you just what the true promise of this nation really is, of the greatness we have achieved, and of the still yet untapped potential of America to accomplish far greater things still. As I walked back to the subway with Atrios after the meeting, crossing streets named after other great Americans who achieved far more than anyone had expected--Adam Clayton Powell, Martin Luther King, Malcom X--I could not stop thinking about how utterly vast our potential as a nation is. American democracy indeed.
I did not write anything on September 11th about the attacks of September 11th, but somehow to me now it seems more fitting to celebrate the day after the attacks than the day of the attacks. Immediately after we were attacked, we began to rise back up as a nation. Even in the face of conservative exploitation of the attacks to enact a radical agenda we have continued to progress. For example, the people-powered progressive movement has also grown to maturity since the attacks on September 11th, 2001, largely as a response to the conservative exploitation of that day. In the future, when our country is once again back on the right track, when we are tapping our full potential instead of cowering in fear from it, and when we are looking forward to the greatness we can achieve in the future rather than trying to merely replicate the accomplishments of our past, one of the main reasons for our success will be that millions of patriotic Americans were willing to stand up. They were willing to stand up to the mendacious sycophants that were distributing our information, the corporatist oligarchs that were tearing down our social investment, the anti-modernist theocons that were propelling the conservative movement forward, and the psychotic cultural supremacists who would rather set fire to the entire world rather than see time continue to inexorably move forward. Conservatives have endlessly tried to situate the "heartland" of America in a romanticized, bucolic past that never existed, but with every last remaining gasp of air in body, I will argue that I found that heartland beating in Harlem, the day after September 11th, 2006.
And yes, in the picture below, that is me in the back standing next to President Clinton. That is pretty darn cool in and of itself.
Tags: American Democracy (all tags)
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