Looking back at the past year, which was easily the most anemic ever in terms of how much I worked on the .org, it’s clear that I’ve lost enthusiasm for a lot of the political stuff I’ve been so interested in for so long. I entered the year eager to see how Obama would handle himself at the start of his presidency, and I have to admit that I let my hopes get up after his inauguration speech, when he delivered a pretty stinging rebuke to the eight years of Dubya with the man himself sitting not twenty feet away. (I still wonder if Obama would have delivered that speech had Dick Cheney not been wheelchair-bound at the time.) From there, though, things quickly went downhill, either actively (allowing health care reform to become anything but reform), or passively (not repealing "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" even as many of our country’s best Arabic translators sit at home unable to serve their country because of entrenched homophobia). Obama was never "my guy," but I still let myself believe that he, like nearly anyone else, would lead the country in a significantly better direction. Things are better now, yes, but not significantly so by any stretch of the imagination.
As a teacher of rhetoric, keeping abreast of current news is kind of part of my job; doing so provides me with a wealth of information from which to draw potential discussion topics, and it also helps me guide my students towards paper topics that might actually interest them. All things being equal, it’s one of the easier parts of my job, since I also need to stay clued in to things like college football, Taylor Swift, and (gag) the Twilight movies and books. This means catching a fair amount of television news, and also checking news Websites throughout the day, and back when I had more motivation to deal with politics, this wasn’t such a problem. Recently, though, I stopped checking for Toledo news stories via Yahoo! News’ Toledo portal, because it just felt like a real chore to me that didn’t yield much, even with the city changing mayors recently. One of the things I’ve liked most about this vacation is simply that so much television news is just year-end recycled stuff instead of new stories, and I haven’t had to catch Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert for a while. That last bit says something because I really like their shows, but recently I’ve just wished I could have that time to do something else with my life.
In the past, it’s taken things that hit really close to home for me to get back into politics, like when I was at Antioch when the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, and several of my friends were arrested protesting outside of John Kasich’s office. You’d think that with all the medical stuff my family has been through these past couple of years that the health care debate would do more to energize me, to get me on my soapbox, but after suffering defeat after defeat this past year, and not knowing if anything will actually ultimately get passed into law, it just seems like there’s no use in it. Obama and the Democrats constantly moved themselves away from progressive principles this past year, and yet Republicans are likely to make significant gains in the upcoming November elections. Sometimes I feel like there really isn’t a place for me here in America.