Pitts: "Unity, Hope Must Conquer Division, Hate"

Take a minute to read Leonard Pitts's column. It's an evocative meditation on this election cycle and the possible end (at least a draw down) of the 1960s culture war that never ended.
Pitts writes,

when I consider the four presidential campaigns preceeding this one, it's hard not to regard them as an extended debate over that era. Those campaigns, after all, turned largely on questions of drug use, feminism, Vietnam, draft dodging, anti-war protests and other issues Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey would have found instantly recognizable.

I'm reminded how a young man told me a few years ago that he loathed Bill Clinton because the former president was -- and I quote -- ''a hippie.'' I was floored. Love Clinton or loathe him, that is, putting it mildly, an unlikely description of a man who spent the hippie era as a Rhodes Scholar and Yale University student of law.

But it makes sense if you buy the premise that we have been re-litigating the '60s here, seeking a balance of values between the freedom some of us won and the ''good old days'' others of us lost, between the whispered promise of change and the shouted, strident threat.

Indeed, if you buy the premise, then John McCain's recent attempts to conflate Obama with William Ayers are hardly surprising.

Whatever you think of the '60s, though, one thing is undeniable: They tore us apart, ripped American society to pieces and threw those pieces in the air so they rained down like confetti, falling into new configurations, nothing where it used to be. It was an angry time, those who found stability -- identity -- in the old configurations fighting those intoxicated by the possibilities of the new.

Which is why some regarded the presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy with such ineffable hope. His was a promise to reconcile the shredded pieces, to make them -- make us -- whole again. Then he walked through that hotel kitchen, and we lost everything that might have been.

Forty years later, we are still angry, still sifting through confetti pieces, trying to find a way to make them whole. And here comes Barack Obama wanting to be president.

He has an economic plan, sure. He has a healthcare plan, yes. He has a promise to end the war in Iraq, fine.

Those are important matters, certainly. But when I look at this guy and reflect on the hate I see in my country, the lack of purpose I see in my country, the division and fear I see in my country, those concerns feel distinctly secondary.

You know what I hope Barack Obama is? I hope he is reconciliation -- the end of the 1960s at long last. And the beginning of something new.

As someone born in the 1960s and raised in its aftermath, I agree with Mr. Pitts. And once again, we arrive back at "the intangibles"--hope, promise, and opportunity. These elements don't substitute for policy, but they complement policy and offer us a chance to re-envision ourselves--to leave the events of 40 years ago, and its resulting polarization, behind.