Humble Hopes and Insane Idealism
posted by Robert Ahdieh
On Friday night, I had the pleasure to hear Cory Booker – friend and law school classmate (of a number of the illustrious permabloggers gathered here) – speak on the theme above: “Humble Hopes and Insane Idealism”. It was the third of a trilogy of lectures in the Toni Morrison Lectures series, which Cory was selected to give at Princeton this year.
Cory, of course, is now the mayor of Newark and, by all accounts, a rising political star. What struck me most in watching and listening to him, though, even after a ten year hiatus, was how much he was the same guy who lived a few doors away from Deven and me in our 1L year, at Mansfield Apartments in New Haven. And a good and genuine guy, at that.
His remarks were impressive, even by the standard of Princeton lectures and popular politicians. Even as he spoke to the state of our politics and the ongoing economic crisis, he weaved in talk of Don Quixote and Pericles, the evolution of urban architecture, and the critical need for love – and not of the romantic variety – in the continued “journey of America’s spirit”.
Like many (perhaps particularly among practitioners of law), I have come to view politics, its practitioners, and our political life as a whole, with a fairly jaded eye. Talk of “hope”, “insane idealism”, and a “journey” of the spirit – let alone of “love”, simply gets filtered out, as empty words, to be written off as the pretty words of someone who wants to keep his job.
Listening to Cory, though, something was different: It was clear that he really meant it. He really believed that “love” mattered to our political life.
And as I watched the crowd – an educated, successful bunch likely to be as cynical as the next guy – it was clear that they wanted to believe it too. And, abused though I may be for it, as I listened, I began to believe it as well. Perhaps, I wondered, we might do well to give hope, idealism, and perhaps even love a chance.
Perhaps it might do our political life some good.
October 5, 2008 at 10:15 am
Posted in: Current Events
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