Tiananmen

Not long ago, I was considering what has been the most extraordinary thing that I had witnessed live on television as it happened.

Sadly, most of the events that bobbed to the surface – the shuttle Challenger explosion, the Gulf War, the second plane hitting on 9/11, the US invasion of Iraq – provided credence to the assessment of the medium by one of the characters in John Irving’s novel A Prayer For Owen Meany…

“Television gives good disaster.”

And the one event that this viewer would put at the top of such a list began with the gathering of thousands of Chinese students to mourn the death of pro-market, pro-democracy and anti-corruption official, Hu Yaobang.

It was April, 1989 and the name Hu Yaobang meant nothing to me. I had a gauntlet of rapidly-approaching spring finals with which to contend.

I had moved into a house just off campus a year earlier and it was the first time I had ever had cable television. The television in our living room was never off. Even in the middle of the night, there was usually at least one of the six of us watching something or crashed out on the couch.

By the middle of May in ‘89, it was tuned mostly to CNN.

The mass of mourners gathered for Hu Yaobang had mushroomed into a series of national protests in China; thousands of Chinese students from universities across the country were making their way to Tiananmen Square, calling for a free media and government reform.

CNN was beaming us footage ‘round the clock.

For two weeks, it was the greatest show on Earth.

These kids didn’t look like us, but, like us, they were kids. Of course, this kid was working in a record store and the biggest decision I made each day was whether to sleep in and skip my summer classes or to get up, eat leftover pizza, and skip my summer classes.

On the other side of the globe, these kids were changing the world. These kids were defiantly erecting the Goddess of Democracy statue. These kids were giving the middle finger to The (Chair)Man.

And they were winning.

The Communist Party was bumfoozled as to how to handle the situation as the entire planet held a collective breath, watching the history playing out.

The kids were !@#$%&@ winning.

And, of course, it all came crashing down on the night of June 3rd. The Goddess was pulled down and perhaps thousands were massacred.

Two days later, CNN offered us the final image – the iconic footage of one lone student stopping a column of tanks as they rolled out of the Square.

I had a shift at the record store.

And I had a new understanding that the idealism of youth (or the youthful in spirit) would always be the underdog to frightened old men with tanks.

Patti Smith – People Have The Power
from Dream Of Life

“People have the power
The power to dream
To rule
To wrestle the world from fools.”

Butch, Barack And Bob’s Benefit Bash

So, it’s official. There’s a new point guard running the show – although, from what I’ve read, the president must have been a shooting guard – possibly a chucker :-).

During the primaries last spring (and early summer) and into the general election, I read and listened to endless commentary regarding Barack Obama and the parsing of his qualification to be president. The focus was often on what he had or, as his detractors pointed out, what he hadn’t accomplished during his brief time as a U.S. senator.

And through it all, his appeal was quite simple to me. I kept hearing an exchange of dialogue from the movie Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid.

While The Kid was the steely-nerved gunslinger, Butch was the brains behind the partnership. After laying out one of his schemes, Butch is told by Sundance to “just keep thinkin’ Butch. That’s what you’re good at.”

To which Butch replies, nonchalantly, “I have vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”

From the moment I saw him speak at the Democratic convention in 2004, Barack Obama struck me as someone who has vision.

And watching the mass of diverse people gathered to witness his inauguration today, I thought of Live Aid, and remembered Joan Baez greeting the globe that day as she opened the American portion of the show.

“Good morning, children of the 80s. This is your Woodstock, and it’s long overdue.”

As a child of the ‘80s, I remember a brief moment when we still had enough innocence to believe that we could save a continent simply with the help of some musicians we loved.

Has such a large portion of the humans come together to try and fix something since that July day in 1985?

And as I read online accounts of reactions from people around the world, from Kenya to Japan to Colombia and Indonesia, there was a lot of use of a word which has almost become pejorative when used by the naysayers to Obama.

Hope.

And I had to remind myself that, in the words Andy Dufresne wrote to Red in the movie The Shawshank Redemption, “Hope is a good thing.”

I have no idea if Obama can accomplish the lofty things he has proposed, but it does seem as though he has brought together a sizable amount of the humans, curious enough to believe.

And for however long that lasts, it is kind of cool.

Peter Gabriel – Of These, Hope

Bruce Springsteen – High Hopes

Toni Childs – House Of Hope

Spirits – Hope