It's no secret that I admire the President. In Barack Obama I see the best professors/pastors/bosses I've had, the kind of person who listens to your problem empathetically, writes it down and says "I'll look into it" and when you ask him about it three weeks later you find he actually did look into it. I treasure people like that. They are rare.

For me the most fascinating part of the Obama story is the years spent as a community organizer in Chicago. So many times in my own idealist mind I've floated ideas of roles I could take to make the world a better place--PeaceCorps, AmeriCorps, church volunteer, charity organizer, etc.--but somehow those ideas always remain just that. They always fizzle out when I remind myself of how difficult it is to change people, and convince myself that there is no way for one person to change society. Not to mention the fact that you are paid peanuts, if that, for the work. Why would anyone take such a thankless job?

Maybe it was less curiosity and more a need for a role model that got me to buy a copy of Dreams from My Father. No, role models aren't only for children. As a clueless twentysomething I wanted to see for myself the path of a person who truly cares and doesn't just say things people want to hear. Some excerpts:

Look at yourself before you pass judgment. Don't make someone else clean up your mess. It's not about you. They were such simple points, homilies I had hear a thousand times before, in all their variations, from TV sitcoms and philosophy books, from my grandparents and from my mother. I had stopped listening at a certain point. I now realized, so wrapped up had I been in my own perceived injuries, so eager was I to escape the imagined traps that white authority had set for me. To that white world, I had been willing to cede the values of my childhood, as if those values were somehow irreversibly soiled by the endless falsehoods that white spoke about black.
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So Regina was right; it had been just about me. My fear. My needs. And now? I imagined Regina's grandmother somewhere, her back bent, the flesh of her arms shaking as she scrubbed an endless floor. Slowly, the old woman lifted her head to look straight at me, and in her sagging face I saw that what bound us together went beyond anger or despair or pity.

What was she asking of me, then? Determination, mostly. The determination to push against whatever power kept her stooped instead of standing straight. The determination to resist the easy or the expedient. You might be locked into a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsiblilities.
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...[A]t night, lying in bed, I would let the slogans drift away, to be replaced with a series of images, romantic images, of a past I had never known.

They were of the civil rights movement, mostly, the grainy black-and-white footage that appears every February during Black History Month...Such images became a form of prayer for me, bolstering my spirits, channeling my emotions in a way that words never could. They told me...that I wasn't alone in my particular struggles, and that communities had been a given in this country, at least not for blacks. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men--and in the civil rights movement those dreams had been large. In the sit-ins, the marches, the jailhouse songs, I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you'd been born or the house where you'd been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned--because this community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redefine itself--I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life.

That was my idea of organizing. It was a promise of redemption.