MEADOR: Obama helps reveal the 'saint' side of America

Let's talk a little bit about Us.


Last Tuesday was us at our best. It was a day for Americans to celebrate the Us that believes anything is possible.

The Us that won't allow politics, religion, race or any other label to divide us or reduce us to mere squabbling.

It was the Us that, 150 years ago, called Irish and Italians, Slavs and Swedes, to our shores because they wanted to be part of Us.


And, miracle of miracles, they could.

It was a celebration of the Us that enables a white woman pianist, black male clarinetist, Jewish violinist and a Chinese cellist to play a piece composed by a white male to celebrate the inauguration of a mixed child born to a Kansas woman and a Kenyan man.
In his speech President Barack Obama spoke of the Us that won't sacrifice ideals for safety, won't divide the world into rigid, narrowly defined categories of "good" and "evil."

In short, it was a celebration of all that is good in America.


The celebration was made all the more beautiful because it allowed us to forget – even if for just one day – about what columnist Leonard Pitts has called the "lowest common denominator us."

It's the xenophobic, arrogant, anti-intellectual, overly self-important Us that the world has seen far too often in recent years and that it has come to hate.

It's the Us that has tried to make reactionary ignorance into an American virtue by wrapping it in awww-shucks populist jargon. (Paging Sarah Palin.)

It's the Us that thought torture methods like waterboarding were an acceptable method of defending "American freedom," when in reality it was merely the sacrificing of one part of our identity, our ideals, for another, our freedom.

It's the Us that in our worst moments went so far as to say the victims of our torture deserved it.

It's the Us that failed to realize that the moment you ignore the humanity of your fellow person, you lose your own too.

Some freedom, that is.

For many Americans, that's what we saw when we looked in the mirror.

Pitts nailed it when he described this side of us as, "the us of myth and narrative, the us of simple mind, the reactionary, ill-informed, impatient with complexity, utterly shallow us."


The American identity is, as you can by now see, schizophrenic. Like all human beings, America also exists in a perpetual paradox of saint and sinner.

In recent years, the sinner won out more often than not.

It was the Mr. Hyde in us that saw anyone that didn't look like us as enemies, that thought everything we could lay our eyes on was ours.

There were still glimmers of hope – the chief example being President Bush's extensive work to fight AIDS in Africa. The effort was commendable but often was swept under a rug of torture, cronyism, incompetence and scandal.

Now we're moving forward, and we're hoping that President Obama can bring Us into a new era, where perhaps the saint can be seen more often.

We want to believe that America can be something greater than the sum of its parts. We'd like to think that maybe all those American ideals can achieve the lofty heights to which they aspire.

We want to be able to look in the mirror and see Jekyll rather than Hyde.


Over the past eight years I've learned to be apathetic about my country. Part of it certainly can be attributed to President Bush, but a much larger part is the product of realizing Christianity and nationalism don't mix.

If you're serious about a servant king on a cross, you can't be equally serious about an imperialistic country with a sword.

And yet, I can't rid myself of this notion that there really is something profound about the saint side of the American identity.

It was unmistakable at the inauguration, a group whose diversity would divide them in practically any other community – most churches included – found a commonality that was greater than their differences.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama found a way to include all of us – even reluctantly American cynics like me – in a day that highlighted what is great about America.

Let's hope it continues.


Jake Meador is a junior English and history major. Reach him at jakemeador@dailynebraskan.com.