On Big And Big; The President Speaks From The Oval Office

This afternoon, as we usually do when we're in San Diego, we picked up our little grandson, age 3, at pre-school.  We always have a snack ready to give him as soon as he's buckled into his carseat; today it was grapes--his favorite.  I sit in the backseat with him while my husband drives, and our backseat sessions usually involve learning for him and for me; he learns about what big people think is important and I learn about what's really important.

Today, he was enchanted by a tiny grape among the bigger, juicy ones.  He's learning the language so fast, we can see improvement daily, so I used the opportunity to emphasize new words for small: tiny, little bitty, smaller than.  We also worked on the brand-new concept of middle-sized and categorized each grape accordingly.  I knew this lesson would be a hit, because for about a week or so he's been announcing, after every meal and snack, "I'm getting big and big!  As we worked on comparative sizes, I realized he'd been trying to say that, by eating well, he was getting something that adds big and big--he was saying that he's getting bigger.  When I echoed that term back to him, he nodded firmly...yep, that was what he'd meant all along.  


After liberry books ("you bemember, Gigi: strawberry, blueberry, liberry?"), after making a big tent from quilts and cushions in the living room (illuminated by a slashlight), after his Mommy came to pick him up, my husband and I watched on my laptop as the President spoke from the Oval Office on the Gulf oil spill crisis.  

The speech was, as usual, perfectly delivered and, as usual, we almost entirely approved of it.  We approved of the order in which he brought out his points of emphasis.  We approved of his insistence on third party handling of the funds BP must advance.  We very much approved of the way he clearly stated what we've all been thinking, what's been making us all a little sick with anxiety since we realized that the spill wasn't being contained: this spill has got to be the signal event that breaks our last ounce of denial on climate change and the addiction to fossil fuel that has caused it.  


This is it, America.  There's not another moment to be wasted on denial, fear, and ignorance.  There's not a thought to be spared for the foolishness of leaving this up to someone else, someone more powerful, someone more connected, someone other than me.  I can't pretend for one more minute that things will be okay for my grandson's future..."somehow."  Time's up.


The President reached in and touched us all, conservative and liberal, on our proudest flesh: he invoked our pride in the way we pulled together to win World War II and to put men on the moon.  He said we've got that history to draw on as we try to believe we can  break our oil addiction, rescue our country and our planet,  and recover our beautiful Gulf.  He was stirring and he was right.

Afterward, my husband said that this is bigger than the moon landing, because that only involved a small segment of our population and only one major administrative entity, NASA...although we all certainly enjoyed the glory.  This effort, he pointed out, will take every single one of us.

I would argue that this is bigger than the necessity of winning World War II; there was always hope that mankind could ultimately overcome the worst evil we'd yet encountered as long as mankind, itself, could survive.  This time, that survival is in question.  The President's speech came as close to naming the unnameable as a President should at this juncture.  I knew what he meant, didn't you?

This is bigger than the moon, bigger than the war.  This is big AND big.