Someone Tell the Kids We Might Be Alright

The day after Barack Obama’s historic win in the US I overheard a university student talking about how he’s seen a “wicked book” called “Why America is evil.” I laughed. I suppose I was more amused at the student being excited about his discovery.

I told him that it’s a great title for a book, although the sentiment is nothing new. The individual concerned was dressed in an American baseball cap and baggy hip hop clothing, looking like a wannabe American himself. We discuss Obama’s victory and we both agree that it was a great day in politics. His parting shot of wisdom is to predict a war on the near horizon, although he wasn’t willing to say with whom.

Subsequently, after our discussion, I tried to find the book we had talked about online but the closest I came to any such title was in finding an album by Fun-da-mental called “Why America will go to hell,” but as it seems to have been released in 1999 I’m going to pass that off as irony. There was a lot of it going about at the time. The USA has always had its detractors, from without and within but it occurred to me that anyone of or around the age of that one student, in his early twenties or maybe as young as late teens has not known anything other than a right wing Bush led government. When Bush beat Gore in that controversial 2000 election, eight years ago my student guy would have been maybe as young as ten or twelve. It was the first time I’d ever stopped to think that there are people who have grown up only knowing the US in a very negative light. They have only known a country that has shown no regard for the environment, has no interest in what the rest of the world thinks about them, has invaded two countries and declared war on the concept of terror and have been lead by a man who once stated, “You’re working hard to put food on your family.”

If this is all they’ve known it is no surprise that young people will think that a war is on the horizon, that bad things will happen. They have no example in their young adult lives of anything different. For anyone ten years or so older, for anyone who was old enough to be politicised before Bush took over, last Tuesday seemed to be a return to normality. When those election results came through it was obviously a historic moment but for me personally it felt like the world getting back on track after a nightmare eight years. Perhaps those, like my student reading about the evils of America, too young to remember the nineties, could not realise how much this means.

Obama stands for what is possible. There is hope where there was none for the last eight years. I didn’t want the Bill Clinton era to ever end. I was resigned to the fact that sometimes the republicans win and I remember hoping for a quick and quiet four years of George W. Bush. I had no idea. I think I even forgot that there was a very different direction we could have gone in.

I grew up in England under a Conservative government that wouldn’t go away. So, I know what it’s like to welcome change. In the decade since the Labour party took over we’re now desperate to change back. But no change that we enforce here will equal the change that the American people brought about last week. The excitement rippled around the world. Maybe we needed some madness in the world to set us right, to bring us back on track. Maybe we were not ready to go from Clinton to Gore. When you read the words “America”s Back’ it sounds like an apology for all that’s happened since 2000.

Do the kids understand this? Do they know that it isn’t on the cards to invade Iran just because they are a threat, just because when you were a teenager the news was full of how Bush was ready to go to war with any terrorist wherever they may be hiding? Young students growing up watching “Have I got news for you” take the image of a cartoon George W. throwing his dart at a map of the Middle East to see where he will go to war next as a staple image of comedy. It didn’t really occur to me that people will have forgotten the nineties or been too young to know that there was a time before all this and that it is possible to live in relative peace. I remember a couple of years back reading somewhere that it was nice to remember the Nineties when no one was trying to blow us up.

I’ve often heard and harped on myself about the Nineties being referred to as the golden age of freedom. I was once asked by a young hotel receptionist what we could do in the nineties that we were no longer free to do in the twenty first century. If he wanted a lot of one word answers I’m sure I could have contrived some. I’m sure it would have been worth pointing out that it’s getting harder to smoke or drink anywhere. I saw a man on the tube the other day, obviously on his way home from the office. He was drinking a can of beer. It grabbed my attention only because drinking alcohol is now banned on London transport. Although no one seemed to care, it was in my mind that he is not free to drink this one can of beer. Whether you believe it’s right or wrong to drink in public, whether you think banning alcohol in public is part of a solution to the alcohol problems of the country, you cannot deny that it’s small freedoms like this that are being eroded.

I can’t blame George Bush for any of that. They’ve had smoking bans in the US long before they had them in the UK. I remember a bar in San Francisco, being there in Ninety Eight, where my friend asked for an ash tray. He was told it’s illegal to smoke but they gave him a tray any way. A strange kind of freedom.

Although I say that nothing that happened on the world stage could affect my day to day rights, what I do realise is that it helped make the world a shittier place.

Both wars, that were initially called liberations but soon without an ounce of subtlety were being called invasions, the torture and water boarding, the abuse of power, the stupidity and deceit (there were no weapons of mass destruction), these were being done in my name. I am disappointed with Tony Blair more than Bush sometimes because I cannot understand why we followed the US into battle or why we are still there. And these wars, ironically, are being thought like Vietnam. We were promised a smooth technology led war. What we’ve got is good old fashioned door to door guerrilla warfare. I still have two newspaper cuttings. In one we are informed how the Iraq war will be thought like no other, that technology will play a part in proceedings like never before. In the second article, after years of fighting, the US admits that half of the technology they were talking about still doesn’t exist. It’s hard to feel good about your government when you’re being lied to so blatantly.

But, beyond making the world a worse place, beyond being lied to and feeling cheated, one night, sometime shortly into Bush’s second term, I lay awake thinking about how the world could have been a different place and it could have been different right down to the way we think and live our lives. I got out of bed and sent a message to a friend. It read as follows:

Lying in bed trying to sleep and this very coherent vision of a different twenty first century comes to mind and I wanted, needed, to impart to someone. It’s 2000 and Al Gore is elected President. Either 911 never happened or in response the US does not declare war on Afghanistan. They certainly don’t invade Iraq without reason or provocation. As a result we do not prolong a feeling of social, political and economic dread. Democratic led America, that was so polarised in the 2000 election, with the backing and sympathy of the world and UN actually comfortably wins the 2004 election. America and the world seems less divided and not at war. People do not feel the need to break off into their small communities for a sense of false security. As a result bullshit pc ideas don’t have much weight in a better mixed society. Comedians and activists don’t find the social and political scene so tragically funny and concentrate on more experimental humour and issues that are bigger than taking pot shots at an ineffective and corrupt government. We move on to more important issues. Led by the US, governments actually become more proactive on the environment issue. Many writers and creative types don’t seem to be so stymied by a culture and business world that is living in fear. Better ideas are readily available and viscous shallow thinking never becomes cool. People are subtly hit with better things to think of. A sense of freedom prevails and I can go to sleep without having to think of all this.

Do I think all this would have happened if George W Bush had not come to power? Or was I having a bad week? It was a dream really, of how things could have been so much better. That’s all it was. What does it matter now? Strangely this all came to mind again when I recently saw Bill Clinton interviewed on John Stewart’s The Daily Show. He was talking about how the Democrats would have avoided the current financial meltdown. To just hear him speak of investing in alternate forms of energy and creating new jobs in those fields seemed like science fiction. The last eight years never even hinted at such possibilities. The world we saw was so far removed from what he was suggesting. My guy in the library never imagined that world. It didn’t occur to me at that moment to tell him that he found it easy to think up wars and racist America gunning for their new president and a bleak political future because it’s all he’s known. That young person’s view of the world is probably one of the unmentioned real costs of the last eight years. Maybe now we can try and be a bit more positive, a bit more hopeful.

Words: 1807