Watching President Obama give this year's "State of the Union" address on my trusty iPad, my first thought was, "Finally, the President has caught up with corporations everywhere in using PowerPoint to give presentations." As a graphic designer and a web UX designer I feel I have to thank the president and his team for developing a tasteful, highly effective set of visuals that avoided self-serving "design tricks" like gratuitous animation to provide a genuine complement to the President's speech. I held my breath as the first few slides went by, waiting for a dreaded animation "build" or some other distracting, corny design gimmick, but it never came.
I see a lot of design as does everyone now in this age of information and communication, and I have to say something I don't often feel: I wish I had gotten a chance to be on that design team, not for the usual reason of correcting the impulse to hideous excess that plagues so much design, but so I could take part credit for the presentation. Excellent work, people.
I'm a designer, there is no way I could let that pass without commenting on it. But onto more substantive aspects of the address.
I find that I almost always like what President Obama says, and I like a lot of what he does. In my mind, if nothing else, if everything else is discarded, this is a man who made access to health coverage for people even with pre-existing conditions, a FACT of American life, giving all of us a position from which we will never have to retreat.
"We got it now, suckers, and we ain't ever gonna give it up!" Just that single, tiny concept is to me a gigantic jump ahead in the civility of this country and hopefully, in time, the world. Sure, other countries had it first, but, no offense, but it's a totally different thing to say, "They have it in Canada", than to say, "They have it in the United States of America", which is, for better or worse, the global icon for power and democracy. Even if we play catch up, when we do it makes it just that much easier for others to follow.
Because, as an American I believe that Obama's basic moral statement resonates with mine, that ALL people are important, and we ultimately have a stake in the life of every living person. During ups and downs, this has remained the place where people dream to be, and that they dream to emulate. Every good thing we do in America is a beckoning to people everywhere: "Come on, you guys, be like us!" Not in the sense of wiping out their own identity, but in the sense of defining what every human being has a right to have just by being born.
Obama is unquestionably a great man, and I believe that he will be remembered as one of the greatest American presidents. But there are still questions that gnaw at me. He addresses the important principle of rejecting the idea that we can only maintain peace by maintaining a constant war footing. And he has put his money where his mouth is by aggressively opposing any that would stop him, and bringing an official end to the horrendous, senseless, and very expensive military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But I still have to ask, "What about JSOC, and what about SOCOM, Mr. President?"
("What about the WHAT and the WHAT now???" I hear people ask.)
JSOC and SOCOM are two expressions that I know about that describe our alarming increase in "Special and Covert" operations around the world. These are NOT the military forces the President means when he is talking about bringing our troops home, they are Spec Ops troops like Army Rangers, Green Berets, coupled with contracted private military operatives that are estimated to now have a presence in as many as 130 of the world's 200 or so countries, a number that has apparently DOUBLED on Obama's watch.
Sure, we're bringing the average soldiers home, but meanwhile we are expanding our covert military presence to MOST of the countries in the world, but with names that nobody knows, and that therefore nobody can really question. And we SHOULD be able to question, if only to say, "Hey Obama, who ARE these people and what are they DOING?"
We should be able to ask that question not simply on moral grounds but on economic grounds because these "covert" and contractor military operatives cost our country by some estimates upwards of a TRILLION DOLLARS per year.
If no one else will, I want to stand up and say, "Excuse me...I WANT MY TRILLION DOLLARS BACK PLEASE." STOP talking about how Americans have to tighten their belts and let go of critical government services when a secret TRILLION dollars is evaporating every year from our economy to suit goals and purposes that nobody has even bothered to acknowledge, let alone justify.
The Visible Soldiers are coming home! But the secret soldiers are going out--and we pay for them. They had better be doing a lot of important stuff we can't do without for that much money, for asking people at home to do without food and shelter.
And, as he should, the President gave an implied thumbs-up to the next Nobel Peace Prize winner, a man who sacrificed everything to give us critical information that Obama and the government was doing everything they could to hide from us, Edward Snowden, by mentioning that we need to respect our values and the right to privacy of people all around the world.
But Snowden is still a criminal on the run, and Julian Assange is still under house arrest at an embassy in London, at the behest of our president. Obama has announced some fairly vague and unsatisfying new "controls" on the ever expanding, enormous Surveillance State of America. Obama says not that the NSA has to stop collecting our personal communications, but that the data should be handed off to someone else for "protection" from abuse by our own agents. But...who? What organization can be imagined that can step in and take this data, and somehow mysteriously gain the power to withhold it from secret entities within the US government?
What about the fact that NO ONE can show that ANY of this information has prevented or even inconvenienced a SINGLE TERRORIST ACTION against the US? Shouldn't this mean that the NSA should simply stop this very questionable activity and thereby release the BILLIONS it costs to run the NSA and similar agencies BACK into our economy?
As he is up there eloquently expounding on our highest ideals, they are still STEALING our private data--and forcing us to pay billions for the "privilege".
Our President says--and does--some wonderful things, for the people of this country, and of the world. But these frightening issues still have a cozy hiding place in the unexplored depths of his administration, and of OUR government.
President Obama, Thanks for all you have given us, but it's not enough. We want more.
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