Like many others Barak Obama's historic speech touched me deeply. Why? Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" helps me answer that question.
Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. "Come on," she said. "Hurry up."
Mr. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said. gasping for breath. "I can't run at all. You'll have to go ahead and I'll catch up with you."
The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson few pebbles.
Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, "Come on, come on, everyone." Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.
This is where Barak Obama is today, the center of a community ritual that seems inevitable. It happens at about the same time every year. It is so old and well established that people have even forgotten where and why the ritual started in the first place. There are some in the community who see a way out, even know of other communities where the ritual has been abandoned, but they are silent once the stoning begins.
"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed,
Mrs. Hutchinson seems to have no choice but to assume her role as ritual stoning victim and complain to the deaf ears of her stone holding community.
and then they were upon her.
This deadly game as played today in politics has continued to develop and a new rule has been added to the lottery script. Now you can save yourself by substituting someone in your place. All the pundits chant in unison "Barak Obama needs to ..." as they define the rules of the game. So the lottery game goes on. The successful players follow the rules of the game and learn through bitter experience how to avoid being hit by the stones. But this is where experience fails us, individually and collectively, because the experience of lottery survivors argues that in order to succeed we have to play the game. If we accept the stoning all survivors will have blood on their hands by the end of the day and the lottery will continue.
The core social dynamic that allows the perpetuation of the lottery is the willingness to separate someone out from the community for a punishment. In our current politics the punishment is invalidation of someone’s reality. All the survivors get to affirm their validity and to invalidate someone else, usually a representative of a rival political constituency.
So when Mr. Obama says
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love."
He is addressing the use of race as a divisive political weapon but he is going farther than that. By objecting to the division of someone from our community as a ritual object of social invalidation he is calling for an end to the ritual of the lottery as a political process. Abandoning this divisive process at its root opens the door for positive affirmation of the legitimate grievances and aspirations of everyone because we truly are inseparable. That is a place to start a movement.
His speech was one of the most honest and beautiful things I have ever read or heard. But it was more than that. It was a deep call to all of us to recognize our inherent unity while respecting our obvious and important individuality. He is leading us out of the politics of either or into the politics of and. It is a much more complex and rich form of political dialog than we have experienced recently, but I think enough people are ready for it and I think this time it will carry the day. That is why I couldn't stop crying. Not this time, no lottery, we are all legitimate, and it is time to stand up for what we can become.