{ Daily Archives }
March 8th, 2008
No Jedi
As everyone knows, all wisdom is contained in the movie The Empire Strikes Back. Naturally — it’s got Yoda.
One of the big slam-bang wisdom scenes in the movie occurs when Luke Skywalker tries to levitate his crashed spaceship out of a swamp. Luke grimaces and strains, and manages to raise the ship a few inches, but then he collapses and the ship sinks even deeper into the muck. “It’s too big,” he gasps.
Yoda tells Luke that size doesn’t matter. “My ally is the Force,” he says. It is a field created by all living things. It’s particularly strong in the swamp, which teems with life. “And a powerful ally it is,” collectively much bigger and more powerful than Luke, or Yoda, or the sunken spaceship. Then he raises the ship and moves it to dry land.
Luke failed because he thought he was doing it himself.
In last week’s debate, Hillary Clinton said, “The question that I have been posing is, who can actually change the country?” She says she can.
Remember Hillary’s tongue-in-cheek Christmas campaign ad, where she was wrapping up “universal health care,” “alternative energy,” “bring troops home,” and “middle-class tax breaks” as the gifts she was giving to the American people? It bothered me. I still like to imagine we have government by the people, not by the president.
In a speech last month, she said, “It’s about picking a president who relies not just on words but on work, hard work, to get America back to work.”
Just words? Obama has inspired millions of Americans who were sitting on the sidelines to get involved in building a stronger and better America — an involvement that doesn’t end on Election Day, but only begins then.
If Clinton thinks that doesn’t matter — that his message is “just words” — if she thinks that solutions to the country’s problems can be her gift to us; if she thinks she can grimace and strain and make the change America needs by the force of her will, then I think she is not a Jedi yet.