Little Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye

One of the benefits of living in an ultra-swank building in one of those cities where developers spent the last five years thinking, "What will attract these young hipsters to our condos?" is that you can watch CNN (does this reveal my city or what?) while waiting for the elevator and can even program your key fob so the TV inside the elevator switches to a channel of your choice.

But imagine my dismay when my daily dose of CNN informs me that my darling, my golden boy, nay, my man has decided to drop out of the Presidential race. Oh, little Johnny. With your John Ritter-style good looks (before he got all pudge), your charming smile, your gold Dodge Grand Caravan, your brilliant and humble wife, you were my last great hope for this country.

*Tear*

It's not every day that someone who occupies a position of privilege actually takes the time to think about the people who really make this country, its economy, and the great machine of capitalism tick. A political platform, certainly, but also an understanding of the types of programs and policies we really need to sustain our labor force. And by sustain, I'm not talking about keeping the workers alive. What I mean, instead, is that these people deserve respect, dignity, and access to health care, jobs, and education--all of these things that so many of us (including me) enjoy uncritically.

When I was holed up in my Ivy League tower, drinking my education through a funnel (that's a joke, Mom), I really didn't think much about how and why I got there. Yes, I knew that my immigrant parents took a great risk, came to America and worked very hard. Yes, I knew that I had worked hard enough to get into college. But I never thought about why people didn't get college educations, didn't have health care, didn't have jobs.

These are things that became urgently important to me, particularly when I began to work in education, saw and heard about what can happen in classrooms, and read more about the state of the public education in the United States, Every Child Left Behind, and everything by Jay Matthews (for what that's worth). Later, when I went to graduate school and took a course on pedagogy, I read Paulo Freire's Literacy and, later, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. While Brazilian adult education might not seem germane to the problems ongoing in the United States today, Freire had his finger on the pulse of the ideological state apparatus:

Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. This distortion occurs within history; but it is not an historical vocation. Indeed, to admit of dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.

John Edwards showed a commitment to the enterprise of being human instead of a commitment to corporations more interested in the enterprise of dehumanization. He realized that those of us who have the means can be noblesse oblige, in the true sense of the word--nobility obliges, with great privilege comes great responsibility. Critics derided Edwards for that soundbite we've all heard: his father was a mill worker as was his grandfather before him. But even though Edwards--a first-generation college student--got the education his father and grandfather never could have and earned amounts of money of which his forefathers only could have dreamed, he remembered where he came from. He remembered the people he came from.

For a brief moment, I had great hope that we might have a leader who was willing to put his money where his mouth was, cared about invisible labor and exploited workers, and demonstrated a commitment to the sort of progressive populism that we so desperately need to make the world a better place. Perhaps you're thinking, "Oh, that'll never happen" and, believe me, I've heard it before. But John Edwards believed that it could happen and offered us a politics of hope.