Obama Farewell

I watched President Obama’s farewell speech last night with my wife. It was an incredibly hopeful and moving speech, and the part near the end when he spoke to and about his family and his VP and friend Joe Biden was hard to see without crying. The presidency is huge, an unimaginably high-pressure job in which you are pulled in a million different directions and challenged every day to keep thousands of balls in the air. Obama did it with grace and often made it look easy, which it was not. I truly believe he is one of the most decent human beings ever to hold this office and that when he had to comfort the families of children murdered in Newtown or order military operations or drone strikes that took lives, often including innocent lives, that this responsibility truly weighed on him. I don’t want to contrast him with what is following him in just over a week. There’s no comparison. But at least we had this great and decent man as our president for eight years.

This is not to say he was perfect in office – he would be the first to say he was far from perfect. He made mistakes, some of them very costly, but very few people are in the position to judge the trade offs a president is forced to make to keep our country mostly safe and mostly free most of the time. And I far prefer the coolness of Obama to the impetuousness of… certain others.

For those of us who believe in facts, who believe in the Constitution, who believe in science, who believe that all people deserve a chance, who believe that America is a great country but not the most important one in the world – wow, he was our president. For those who hate him for whatever reason, whether it’s because they didn’t prosper while much of the country was getting better after the near-disasters of the Bush years, or just because they choose to believe that this country is somehow intended to be Christian and White, I feel sorry for them. They missed out on something great.

His speech suggested that we need to keep working for what is right even in the face of the evil that has wormed its way into Washington and will be in charge for at least four years (assuming we make it that long). He says he’s optimistic, and I want to believe him, I want to try, but it’s very hard, even for a natural rational optimist like me. I’m giving money. Can I do more than that? Can I be an activist? Can I stomach the noise of politics more than a few months every four years? I don’t know. I'm glad I volunteered for the small amount of campaign work and donated the money I did in 2008 and 2012 (and 2016), but now I can barely stand to watch MSNBC for more than a few minutes. My wife watches it a lot and she’s anxious about the coming time. I get that, wanting to be informed but scared to death of what you see happening. I'm fortunate that I am able put it aside and focus on other things – sometimes anyway.

I don’t know what to do. Reach out to the other side? Try to cross that shaky bridge? I'm not sure I can, and that in itself is a bad sign. I need to think more about it once the dust has settled a bit. But I know I will miss having a president who is smart and who I can trust to lead our country for the benefit of its people. That is a huge and scary loss.