Politics is boring. That’s what people tell me.
And it’s hard to argue that The New York Times or CNN regularly peak my adrenaline level. But in my final column with the Herald, I can try to explain why politics is the most fascinating craft a person could master in our era, and the roots of my political philosophy.
My mother was raised during the Nigerian civil war. Her childhood is full of memories of mortar fire, tanks, artillery bursts and feeding the haggard troops who stopped by her door desperate for some relief. My childhood was punctuated by these stories of my mother somehow finding time to study amid the chaos and putting herself through boarding school in a country whose twin scars — war and corruption — cover most of its body.
When I heard these stories as a boy and the rantings of other Nigerians from my mother’s generation about the situation “back home,” I assumed there was something wrong with my people. America seemed an idyllic country where everyone waits in line for their ration of riches and the good guys always find some way to prevail. I thought that perhaps by its very nature, African government would be corrupt and the people clueless as to how they might emulate the modern world. I thought that until I finally went there and saw the power of circumstance firsthand, and a people with a character no different than back in Wisconsin. They inhabit the postcolonial wasteland that conceived Western civilization.
My mother came to Milwaukee in 1985 with my father and a 1-year-old child. By the time I was born, we still lived in a friend’s basement on the rough side of town with toys strewn about the thin carpets until my father landed a job as a city accountant. One of my fondest memories is of visiting his cavernous glass office downtown during the Great Circus Parade. From then on in my eyes, he ran the whole city.
My father spent a lifetime building relationships in the Nigerian community and his years as an American with our Catholic church. Then he died. And suddenly they were gone. The funeral was well-attended, but we sat in the second row of pews alone and I kept my eyes firmly in my lap for the whole service — embarrassed and frustrated that I had to be there, that we were the subject of pity, that I was so physically ill with depression that we had to forgo what would have been our final visit to him in the hospital. I was only in fourth grade, but I couldn’t get angry when, out of childhood angst, my brother blamed me because I blamed myself.
All of the sunny perceptions of my church faded away when the priest asked twice for the funeral’s attendees to fill the five-pew buffer that separated my family from the mourners. All my sunny perceptions of America faded away when I had to watch my mother drop out of college and work double-shifts at the hospital to keep our young family afloat.
Politics isn’t an academic exercise for me. It’s about a hero who gave everything to make sure her three sons had a better shot than she was ever given. It’s about giving good people a fair chance to get back on their feet when they’ve been knocked down by the cruelty of circumstance. It’s about avoiding the specter of wars that tear apart families who are just as human as we Americans.
The most striking contrast in Nigeria is that between oil wealth and urban squalor. Fenced-off towns of foreigners busy themselves with the intricacies of business and a few dozen yards away children chase down cars peddling cake bread and peanuts.
Men sit shoeless in aluminum and wood huts, wearing tattered Chicago Bulls shirts from 1990. Women wearing carefully arranged bedsheets steal away to pee on the side of a dilapidated concrete structure before supplying their children with more water bottles to shove into the half-opened Mercedes of the privileged few in hopes that they will back their pity and guilt with a few dozen naira. Motor bikers pass a seemingly infinite string of abandoned gas stations on their way to wait in line an hour for a new tank. Beggars are shooed away from an American-style restaurant called “Mr. Big,” where the hip and trendy dine on sinewy beef and stringy chicken that quickly finds a home between your teeth. And a lone smokestack along the beach spits fire and black smoke into a perfect blue sky.
Politics is not boring.
While American conservatives complain of the lazy poor abusing entitlement programs and tout the value of foreign war as if a child will no longer require a parent’s love under a secular government, impoverished Africans are saved only through the kindness of neighbors. My grandmother resides in a communal shack where she helps care for local families. The first, and only, time I met my grandfather, kids squealed around him playing as he sat comfortably in his living room — master of a house that offers these children a chance.
Government is about humanity — our shared burden to ensure the well-being of our fellow man. That we will be judged on our duty to advance our kind so the modern world doesn’t collapse to its prenatal state. This duty is more than a religious directive, but a biological imperative. To improve the state of our fellow man in whatever small way we can. For these reasons, we deliberate through politics to fulfill our sacred imperative. For these reasons I proudly advocate for the true tenets of liberalism, which, despite its flaws, seeks to carry mankind into a future where perhaps the suffering of the poor and the pity of war can be dutifully dispatched.
Politics is not boring. Politics is all we have.
Bassey Etim ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science and journalism.
