Election 2008: The Victory of Idealism Over Issues

My Libyan born Pakistani-Canadian brother who lives in the United States now shares his name with the American President.

As residents of the border city of Buffalo, New York, we frequently drive home into Canada, and on returning, US border officials will sometimes joke with him when they read the name on his passport.

"Hussain Rizvi. Hmmm. So, are you related to Saddam?" they chuckle.

Now he finally has a response.

"No, sir - I'm related to Barack Hussein Obama."

The optimism about America's new president-elect is still cautious and reserved. Will he be able to fix an economy in recession, two major wars, and the country's damaged alliances overseas? Will he bring the change he promised? The expectations are high, the tasks daunting, every word under scrutiny, and every action under a microscope.

In the short term, when it comes to policy issues, he'll likely make mistakes like any other president. He'll come through on some of his promises, and may not on others. He'll change his mind on some things. He'll be praised at times and criticized at others.

However, the long term implications of this election aren't as much about the world's issues as its ideals. Barack Obama hasn't just brought change and hope with him - he represents it. He is the living, breathing personification of what Gandhi was talking about when he said, "Be the change you want to see in this world." There are many firsts here, and being the first black president is only one of them.

Obama is the only son of a first-generation immigrant to be elected to the presidency in modern history. He is the product of an interracial marriage, which was illegal in many states until he was six years old. He is also the first anti-war candidate to be elected at a time of war.

As a black man with a last name that rhymes with Osama, the middle name Hussein, and less than two years as a junior US senator, Barack Obama went up against virtually impossible odds when he decided to run for president. He ran against the royal establishment of the Democratic party, the Clintons - not just one, but two of them, one being a wildly popular ex-president. He earned the endorsements of the both the brother and the daughter of President John F. Kennedy along the way. After defeating the Clintons, he ran against an a celebrated American war hero, John McCain - and won again. In doing so, he defeated not just his opponents, but a set of seemingly insurmountable odds that had statistically and historically been stacked against him.

He also defeated an ideology. Richmond, Virginia was the most permanent capital of the Confederacy. The state hadn't voted for a Democrat since 1964, when Obama was three years old. Neither had Indiana. For the first time in 44 years, Barack Obama turned both of those states blue. Although Obama is the first northern-state liberal to be elected to the presidency since Kennedy (Clinton, Carter, and Johnson were all from southern states), he is, unlike Kennedy, an almost entirely self-made man who did not come from a wealthy, politically well-connected family.

Even if Barack Obama was a white man, these achievements would be historic and monumental. He had to have known the odds and the enormity of his ambition, but he seems to have gone for it anyway, simply because, well, he thought he could.

Sure this is about the economy, about Iraq, health care, taxes, Social Security, immigration, and foreign policy. And at any other time, it wouldn't feel like anything could ever be more pressing than these issues, especially how they are all in crisis together at the same time.

But the impact of what happened on Tuesday stretches far beyond even what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the "fierce urgency of now." It goes beyond race and beyond policy issues. It's about overcoming improbable odds and going against the grain, shattering that "real world" myth, and redefining - or de-defining - reality.

This is a big win for that kind of stick-it-out-no-matter-what-they-say idealism, for being daring and not being afraid to question age-old established ideas and perceptions as long as your conscience tells you it's the right thing to do. And it's a very blatantly visible confirmation of all those cliches that don't seem so hollow anymore - that anything is possible and nothing is certain.

This is a return to the celebration of intelligence and education over ignorance and mediocrity; science, reason, and rationality over superstition and dogma; creativity and innovation over tradition; and hope and trust over fear.

My brother Hussain's circumstances aren't of his own making. My parents were professors with a penchant for traveling the world. I have never lived in the same country for more than nine years, and at thirty three, I have lived and gone to school in South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, Canada, and the United States. Among the six members of my family, we have three different countries of birth.

I never really developed any emotional or patriotic affiliation to any one country or region. As a consequence, the ties I formed with the people and the places I've encountered aren't rooted in geography or culture, but in ideology.

Barack Obama was elected at least partly because almost everyone is able to see part of their own story in his story. This phenomenon isn't just restricted to the blue-collar worker who relates to his middle class roots, the Ivy League professor, or the first-generation immigrant. It permeates into a much more intricate demographic that includes the tiny group of us that are third-culture, identity-challenged, foreign non-foreigners like my brother and myself.

This is about how not having a cultural, geographic, religious, or racial identity is an identity in itself.

It's about defying categorization and shedding labels.

It's about how non-American does not always mean un-American.

Maybe the wars will end, maybe we'll all have jobs, and maybe not. For now, this isn't about what will happen, but what already has: this year has revealed an America and a world that has grown up, yet at the same time, regained its innocence.

A Tale of Two Identities

The struggle for belonging and social acceptance has always been a balancing act: conforming enough to be an accepted member of a group, yet being just unique enough to differentiate yourself from others so that you can be appreciated as an individual without risking that acceptance.

And as the world gets smaller and different cultures mix in ways they haven't before, it's getting harder and harder to pull this off.

So how do we form our sense of identity, and what are the identifiers that constitute that sense? To me, it seems that these identifiers can be lumped into two broad categories - "inborn" identifiers and "acquired" identifiers.

Inborn identifiers include factors such as race, ethnicity, nationality, religious affiliation, and gender - these are "unearned" attributes that we usually have at birth, that nobody can take away from us. The majority of us keep them for the course of our lives.

But as most of us evolve and develop, we begin to formulate an acquired identity - shaped by "earned" identifiers such as choice of profession, personal philosophy, wealth, social status, parental/marital status, and the lessons learned from consequences of personal life decisions.

Adolescence is probably the time during which this transitional interface is most visibly manifested - there isn't too much to work from on the inside at that age/stage in life, so most of us embellish ourselves externally to distinguish ourselves, through fashion, hair, piercings, makeup, and so on. The rebellion is cautious: a fragile balance between being different - but not too different to risk becoming an outcast. Being an outlier is still okay, as long as you're within the fringes of the bell curve.

From this point on, many of us continue to evolve, to develop ourselves on the inside, gain an education, form perspectives on our lives and the world through what we see and learn from our experiences, earn a definitive social and financial status in our communities by working hard and making decisions, settle into our professions, and become parents, philanthropists, journalists, artists, engineers, businesspeople, physicians; as we do, our need to cling to our inborn identifiers becomes less urgent.

For those who are not adequately able to formulate that secondary, acquired sense of self, or - importantly - who are stripped of the opportunities or resources to do so, falling back on using inborn identifiers to define themselves is convenient, and very easy: these attributes are always there, and you don't have to work for them.

This is why pride - based on our inborn identities - is so dangerous.

Proud to be American. Proud to be black. Proud to be a Muslim. Patriotism. Nationalism. All of these notions are based on taking immense pride in things you didn't achieve, you didn't work for, and you didn't earn - part of what George Carlin called "false patriotism" in his last performance. These things were always there, since birth. And precisely for that reason, they are the easiest ones to fall back on when you feel like you've been shut out.

There is nothing wrong with feeling fortunate to be born in a Hindu family, or feeling grateful for being American - those sentiments at least still retain a sense of humility. But pride comes from the ego, and when undeserved and unearned, pride can kill - differences over inborn identifiers such as race, religion, and nationality have resulted in most of the crimes, wars, and genocides in history.

"Homegrown terrorism" in Europe, for instance - facilitated by several English speaking, second-generation immigrant jihadists born and raised in Europe - is a consequence mostly of disenfranchised young people who have failed - or haven't had the opportunities and resources - to construct an acquired identity for themselves in one or more spheres of achievement in their lives. So they have fallen back on things like religion and ethnicity. Although their ultimate goal is different, what drives these neo-jihadists is the same phenomenon that drives the blue collar, red-state voters who continue to elect and re-elect politicians, to their own economic disadvantage, because of race-based or religion-based fears about issues such as gay marriage or embryonic stem cell research.

To me, it seems that a person's acquired identity develops and evolves primarily depending on three factors: (i) age, (ii) education, and (iii) socioeconomic status.

Evidencing this is the fact that most of the people who define themselves by way of these identifiers, such as jihadists, are (i) young, (ii) not very well-educated, and (iii) socially or economically disenfranchised.

Some of them get where they are because of bad decisions they have made.

But others - most of them, I believe - get there because they haven't had the opportunities and resources to move beyond their "socioeconomic adolescence" to develop their own evolved, acquired identities.

To combat factors (i), (ii), and (iii), youth empowerment, anti-poverty measures, and massive investment in education are the way to go, not bombs and sanctions, which only increase poverty and disenfranchisement, further curtailing opportunities and resources for education and socioeconomic security.

I was born in Pakistan, lived in North Africa for half a decade, then England for a little less than a year, then Saudi Arabia for eleven years where I went to an American school, then to college and university in Pakistan and Canada, and now, for the last four years, I have been living in the United States. Having no real geographical roots - or many, depending on how you look at it - I have seen that wherever in the world I've been, crimes have almost uniformly been associated with some racial/ethnic groups more than others, and wars almost always appear to be across ethnic or religious lines. Yet, factors like economics and level of education are the common denominator across the board: the main impediments to allowing the individuals in these factions to evolve beyond a blind adherence to their inborn identifiers.

And in places where educated and financially secure people coexist together, such as the university where I work, people who would be killing each other in other parts of the world - Pakistanis and Indians, conservative Muslims and atheists, Palestinians and Israelis, Mel Gibson and Steven Spielberg (okay, that was unfair - sorry, Mel) - somehow get by on a bloodless, gunless, academic form of debate and discussion that, though often heated and passionate, can be civilly conducted over coffee.

How nice would it be to construct a social, political, and economic global environment where others across the world are able to avail the same opportunities and resources that these people have had, making both Lenin and Lennon happy? Imagine.