Obama on the Wall

I hung a picture of president Obama on my wall yesterday. It’s a black and white close up of his face and, as black and white photography always is, it is striking and revealing. The picture came from a story in the December 7, 2009 issue of The New Yorker called “Portraits of Power” (http://www.newyorker.com/online/multimedia/2009/12/07/091207_audioslideshow_platon).

One of the photographers for the magazine set up a photo booth at the recent UN General Assembly and tried to catch as many world leaders’ photos as possible. The result is several pages of simple, gripping photos of some of the worlds most revered and notorious leaders.

So why did I pick Obama to put on the wall? Sure, he’s my president, sure it was practically a national (international?) holiday when he was elected, sure he’s wildly popular around the world. But I didn’t put his picture up for those reasons. I put Obama on the wall because I needed someone to remind me that change requires courage and courage demands something more of yourself than you might freely give.

That probably sounds basic enough; it’s something we perhaps even all think is true, right, obvious. But it hass become very clear to me the last several days, if you’ll forgive the cliché, that there is a difference between knowing what is right and doing what is right. We all often know what is right; resting in the safety of our familiar world it is relatively easy to understand the best course of action, having to face opposition and the very real consequences of pursing that course of action is another thing entirely.

In the face of a situation that has a very clear right and wrong, the desire to simply acquiesce to the situation and not make waves can be intense. Wouldn’t it just be easier to not make a big deal out of things, to just deal with it? But isn’t that tantamount to condoning a situation you find unacceptable? After all, what good is all our moral outrage over the injustices in the world if we can’t even stand up to them when they are staring us in the face?

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the small personal struggles we all face everyday over right and wrong, just and unjust matter immensely. And in each one of them we all have the option to walk away, to dodge the situation, to not deal with it and to move on. And honestly, no one would blame you if you did. But maybe there’s something larger at stake here. Maybe what is important about fighting injustice is knowing you’ve given it your all and realizing it will require more of you than you’d like to give –and then finding the strength to give that.

Obama is not the savior of America and the world that we all sometimes like to think he is. He’s a human, like all of us. But his picture on my wall reminds me that every day mere human being stand up to injustices in this world. They are courageous. They are strong. They give more than they can. They make change happen.