Why I Support Obama!

For the past 16 years the President of the United States has been a member of the heralded “Baby Boomer” generation. It has been a disaster. In Presidents Clinton and Bush we have had the two sides of the boomer coin. Neither one has worked well. Both have had critical flaws. Those flaws are the expressions of the foundation coming of age experiences of boomers and the cultural imperatives that surrounded them.

The 1960s cleaved into two cultures. One was of an earlier, secure time. It was fear based and clung to institutions including church and family which provided the presumptive glue for success and salvation. The other looked ahead and threw off parental and societal norms. Mantras such as “My Country Right or Wrong,” and “Drug, Sex and Rock n’ Roll” frame the dramatic distinctions that are a wedge through the middle of the boomer generation. The War in Vietnam was a central feature of the landscape that shaped the boomer’s perceptions and increased the depth of the division. Presidents Bush and Clinton stand on opposite sides of that cultural divide.

This cultural battle has preoccupied boomers from its beginnings. Those who embraced one side can’t stand those who embraced the other. Words of opprobrium are used to describe one another; uptight, tightass, bible-thumper, or conversely just that one word, “Liberal.” We really didn’t like one another. We didn’t hang out together. In fact, one side didn’t hang out at all, while the other let it all hang out.

Little in the way of consensus building communication can happen between boomers on opposite sides of the divide. Each possesses the rarified wisdom of true belief. Governance, in the context of these disparate views unnecessarily focuses upon legislative efforts to enforce cultural points of view. Should we pray in schools? Should pregnancies terminate? Should gays marry? These are all fairly ridiculous issues in the complex world in which we live. Circumstances and general distrust cause national security issues to be equally polarizing. Calcified positions formed around Vietnam surface to color the dialogue about state-less terrorism. Boomers are frozen in time.

Barack Obama is the first candidate for the Presidency who is a product of the next generation. Although technically a boomer by three years (boomers aren’t born after 1964) Obama came of age after the full heat of the boomer cultural crucible of the 1960’s. He doesn’t have the baggage of the boomers and he doesn’t sit on one side or the other of that boomer cultural divide.

For the sake of our Nation, and our children and grandchildren who have to get past the screed of the cultural divide. I believe that Barack Obama can do that. And that is why I support him for the Presidency of the United States.