At a certain point we will all realize that we don’t necessarily love you, Mr. President. It was not we who strangely awarded you. Those were the Norwegians, and I don’t know them. Others and I awarded you with twenty-dollar donations and a vote. We did not sit with the Norwegian Nobel Committee, and many of us cannot conceptualize the connection between your medal and America’s security. We simply can’t. We can hear the lines; we know how to watch TV—but we can’t know whether you’ll be swallowed by the pitfalls they say you’re now approaching. I can’t see you, Mr. President, valuing the Nobel Committee’s endorsement over the advice of your military advisors and your own ideas about the safety of the American people. Can a big gold coin buy our boys and girls a trip home from Afghanistan? Why didn’t we think of it before? I cannot assume that such things influence you. I cannot say. So I give you the benefit of the doubt, and, My Captain, I see no problem in celebrating.
It’s the first international prize the overwhelming majority of America has ever seen its president win. We revel in the award because, in large measure, it is ours and for us. Your triumphs are not wholly or always yours. The news does not always see it, but I think you do. The presidency is larger than a single man. That’s harder to understand in failure, but I hope you know that we do not always forget it. It’s harder when you have a winning smile, or when you raise a crowded room off its chairs, but we do not always forget it.
We may realize over the coming months and years that we don’t necessarily love you. Not in all the ways we purport to love you now.
Instead we shall love our country. What a statement! What a thing to say! For we shall love ourselves again. This is important to me because I am young, and because I have come to an age where I can know what it means to say it. I know what it means now, but until recently I didn’t know how powerful a sense of civic responsibility can be. I have come to know how great it feels to be beholden to other Americans in a climate that respects that commitment. It fills my chest like warm air in a tire, and now that it’s there I’m ready to speak and act. Your award reminded me that I think this way – that I love – and that it’s okay.
We may realize that we have been in love this way for a while—but that we misnamed it. We, who awoke with the U.S. suddenly stirring in us, called it you; but that was wrong.
Don’t worry, Mr. President: You are not America. We cherish you, but we shall remind ourselves of something important. We shall remember – by examining your work and words and examples – that our hopes for our civic lives do not have to involve you. That lie has lasted too many years.
Our hopes can involve you, and some should; but they do not have to ascend the White House’s steps. Many of us are strong and extraordinary, much like you. Some of use will rise up to speak; some of us already have. More among my generation than I have ever seen are smiling, whether they agree with you or not. That, I think, is the meaning of your gold medal.
You were nominated for the Nobel Prize two weeks into your presidency. You received it ten months later. That is madness. Yet I’ve been smiling for a longer period than I ever have, and I put great stock in that. (I haven’t been alone either.)
I have been speaking and I will continue to; I will continue to drag those around me into discussions and civic actions; I will continue to watch as my friends do the same. Your prize reminded me that we do not have to think about it as your prize for peace. It is ours so long as we keep working.
Mr. President, I hold you in the highest regard. Let us keep bright-smiling together.
