Relationship

{seriously great crowd shot from here, along with an interesting article on the 2012 campaign}

Yesterday, College Green was transformed into one of the first stops on the president’s campaign trail. A sea of faces who waited for hours to hear the words of my president.

I didn’t venture in and fight the crowd. The closest I got to the real celebrity was a quick stop outside the American Embassy to ogle the motorcade on my way to the train station. You know me, I’ve got a thing for motorcades.

Instead, I preferred to listen to my president all on my own yesterday, soaking in his words that always give me shivers; tearing up and pondering, without a sound breaking my thoughts.

So yesterday, I sat perched on the edge of the couch, feeling very 1950’s housewifely in an apron, with a cake in the oven and a dish rag thrown over my shoulder. I listened to my president talk about my two countries, ancestors who are my ancestors, a diaspora I’m part of and that my children and my children’s children will be part of, and a struggling country I live in and root for every day.

***

Politics is a strange animal to me. I struggle because I love the motorcades and the protocols and the elitism of it all. At the age of 20, I loved knowing that the candidate was wheels down and we were about to roll out. I loved flying through intersections blocked off by motorcycle cops. I saved all my S-pins – the little metal clips doled out by the Secret Service to pin to your lapel so you could get through the highest level of security. Right up to the candidate. Right next to the greatness, the importance, that person who was going to change the world.

I believed it. I believed it so hard.

At a certain point, I realized I didn’t like the game. I didn’t like that politics, to many people, is a game. I didn’t like that it was about points and money and strategy and cunning and compromising integrity. I believed too hard in the importance.

I’m reminded of how my mother always says I live my life in black and white, right and wrong.  I struggle with grays.

So I walked away from the game. I married an Irishman, crossed an ocean, and watched my president, that man I believe in so hard, from my couch, even though he was only a few miles away.

I sat on the couch and soaked it in. I let myself miss being right there watching from the wings. I let it ache a little, even as I re-read his words late last night.

It would belittle the carefully crafted words to call it a pep talk, but boy was it ever.

And, Ireland, as trying as these times are, I know our future is still as big and as bright as our children expect it to be.  I know that because I know it is precisely in times like these –- in times of great challenge, in times of great change -– when we remember who we truly are.  We’re people, the Irish and Americans, who never stop imagining a brighter future, even in bitter times.  We’re people who make that future happen through hard work, and through sacrifice, through investing in those things that matter most, like family and community.

We remember, in the words made famous by one of your greatest poets that “in dreams begins responsibility.”

This is a nation that met that responsibility by choosing, like your ancestors did, to keep alight the flame of knowledge and invest in a world-class education for your young people.  And today, Ireland’s youth, and those who’ve come back to build a new Ireland, are now among the best-educated, most entrepreneurial in the world.  And I see those young people here today.  And I know that Ireland will succeed.

{full text here}

So thank you, Mr. Obama, for reminding us that part of our special relationship is knowing when a pep talk is just what the doctor ordered.