By David Gushee
Here is one Christian ethicist’s grammatical analysis of important lines in last week’s thoughtful State of the Union address by President Obama.
Obama: “We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed.”
Comment: We have lived through at least a decade of corrosive politics and media rhetoric that have threatened to turn our undeniable diversity into an actual national fracturing. The president here rhetorically invited every listener to join this statement of what “we believe.” But not everyone acts as if they actually believe that we are in fact one people or share one common creed. It is precisely this “we”-ness that has been denied implicitly or explicitly by many in their moments of greatest rage and contempt. So this line is framed as a factual statement while it is actually an invitation to desperately needed social healing.
Obama: “Governing will now be a shared responsibility between parties…. We will move forward together or not at all.”
Comment: He’s right about that. No more party-line votes to pass major legislation. The leveling of power in Washington, together with the shock of Tucson, does seem to have sobered our legislators. They seemed more like grownups Tuesday night. We should all be glad of that.
Obama: “To win the future, we’ll need to take on challenges that have been decades in the making.”
Comment: He named challenges including technology that eliminates American jobs along with competition from foreign competitors. These are certainly factors, but the president did not name the raw power of the profit motive, which motivates our own home-grown businesses to outsource jobs or move overseas if it improves their bottom line. Companies are global, and few (wherever they were born) show any particular loyalty to any particular nation. So the president is asking us to “invest” in “our free-enterprise system” at a time when it is not clear that “our” free enterprise system is really ours.
Obama: “It’s family that first instills the love of learning in a child.”
Comment: The president is absolutely right. But our families are routinely shredding, or never being formed in the first place. The president called us to turn off the TV and make sure the homework gets done. I wonder, though, if we are now beyond the moment when he could also have called us to greater sexual responsibility, fewer out of wedlock pregnancies, and more permanent marriages?
Obama: “We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones.”
Comment: I used to be a pro-union man, knowing that (labor) power must balance (corporate or state) power in a fallen world. But the power of the teacher unions at this point is truly a problem. Teachers exist to educate children. Unions exist to protect teachers. These are not the same goals.
Obama: “We’ll put more Americans to work repairing crumbling roads and bridges. We’ll…pick projects based on what’s best for the economy, not politicians.”
Comment: I would like to believe in a government that can deploy vast resources to rebuild our infrastructure efficiently and skillfully. But I don’t think we have recent evidence that our politicians think objectively about such projects, or execute their choices in a timely and effective manner. Americans need to see wise projects crisply performed to regain confidence in government’s effectiveness. As the president said, “We’ll work to rebuild people’s faith in the institution of government.” It is indeed quite a task. If he fails in this, the budget ax will begin falling in breathtaking ways, and few will lament.
Obama: “This is a country where anything is possible — no matter who you are, no matter where you come from.”
Comment: It was indeed inspiring to see three men of humble origin — Barack Obama from Hawaii, Joe Biden from Scranton and John Boehner from Cincinnati — on screen at that moment. This is indeed the kind of country in which any well-educated and highly motivated human being has a chance to occupy a major seat of power in the government. That dream-chasing, hope-inspiring, equality-committed society is worth celebrating.
But in the end, what matters to a nation is not simply that humble persons rise to public power. What truly matters is that when they get there they execute their responsibilities well. And probably that has much more to do with us than it does with them.