Madeleine Albright
Melissa got free tickets this week for her and I to see Madeleine Albright speak at KU last night.
It was a great talk. Madeleine is not just brilliant, she's wise and she's got a very decent heart. She's politically savvy. She was a too anti-Bush and her comments on the Iraq war being the worst foreign policy disaster ever were more hyperbole than substance, I thought, but she had so many good things to say about ways to deal with serious problems in the world like Iraq, the Palestine and Israel, proliferation of nuclear weapons by Iran and North Korea, and the tragedy of genocide in Sudan.
It was really refreshing to listen to someone talk on international policy who took thought and dialogue and diplomacy and engagement and compassion and realism seriously. She may be the strongest Secretary of State that America has had, though I do wish she would have been less petty about our current and also brilliant -- but not quite so brilliant or wise -- Secretary of State in Condoleeza Rice, or Condi's boss, the President.
There were many things that struck me about the talk that I should write about at some point.
But maybe the most important was that after spending so many of my days among children and in the inner city, it was really refreshing to spend time with people who I could more intuitively trust more.
People who attend a lecture at a liberal arts university may be more of a homogenous liberal crowd than I think is good for discussion and engagement. But people who take time to attend a discussion by Madeleine Albright, and a free one at that, are good people, for the most part. People who care about the world beyond their own day to day lives. They are people who think, and for the right reasons, often. They are people who care. And they are the kind of people that I like to be around.
After days upon days of people openly disrespecting me, perpetually finding ways out of work, people flaunting how much they don't care about others or anything of any real importance, it was nice to spend time with people not quite as lost in their own bullshit.
This was what I loved about Brandi's and my time in Washington. We didn't spend time with politicians or lobbyists. Brandi and I spent time with people like Theo Brown and Carolyn Lukensmeyer who were just more genuinely good people. Who came to D.C. for the same reason Brandi and I loved our time there: because they wanted to do good.
And those people are good people to spend time with, liberal or conservative, Democrats or Republicans, Christians or Jews or Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or any of the major or minor world religions or ethnic groups, as flawed as even all of them and all of us are now and forever into perpetuity.
A lot of good people have gotten kind of intolerable, recently; self-righteousness makes people kind of hard to put up with, sometimes.
But self-righteousness doesn't lead, not for real. And we can only live without more genuine leadership for so long.
That kind of leadership comes from more genuine people like Madeleine Albright and her boss who she had quite a bit of good to say about, President Clinton.
And the most genuine leadership, of course, does not come from the formal power of political leaders. It is the example that they offer and that which we provide ourselves, each of us for ourselves.
Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton are two such decent people, and for many reasons, in my book, Madeleine in particular.
And it was nice being around people who took thought more seriously than so much of the bullshit that passes for something of substance in this world. It had been a long time since I had been in the presence of people who took substance that seriously.
And last night was a refreshing coming home, in that regard.
Love,
Ben
