Shake a Hand, Make a Friend
Among the many accomplishments for which he was lauded on his recent trip to Europe was this, President Obama paid attention to the “little people”. One particular moment was noted by the world press as the American President entered Ten Downing Street with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Approaching Brown’s residence, Obama held out his hand to the bobby standing guard at the door. This handshake, unheard of for the stoic guards who are to stand stock still and unsmiling, though all-seeing, in front of the PM’s and royal residences and political buildings, so surprised and pleased the guard that he held out a friendly had to his Prime Minister. It was ignored. Gordon Brown was not being unkind. In his defense, handshakes between the classes, between the gentry and those who serve them, are simply not done in Britain.
Brown may have been as surprised by the gesture made towards him as was the guard by President Obama’s handshake. It is thought by many political and social scientists that the breakdown in social structures begins with the erosion of engrained rules of conduct. There are many ways in which this assessment is correct, of course. In America, something as simple as eating family dinner significantly guards against teenage drug abuse and early parenthood, and enhances interfamilial communication and student grades.
President Obama saw the guard because, certainly, he is a friendly man of broad appeal who has made it a point to be a change agent. But he is also from a much younger country with somewhat different social rules. Prime Minister Brown lives in the context of an older nation and a more ingrained status quo that, even though he has invoked change as a political mandate, has not extended it to upstairs-downstairs relationships.
Here, then, is what some of the press missed in their description of the handshaking event. It is also what Mr. Obama knows: there are no little people. Whether one’s measure of a person is religious or constitutional, we are all created or held to be equal. While England, too, is a democracy, its vestiges of class division remain demonstrably intact – a monarchy with a queen who may only be touched at her initiation, servants whose longevity in service is ensured by their invisibility, an educational system which is structured to place its students in the place they are likely to socially maintain for life, and accents that, by belying neighborhood and heritage, also often serve to maintain a class-based status quo.
And here of course, is our dirty little secret. Behaviorally, we are not yet as different from the country of our birth as we often like to think. The United States of America emerged from its angers with King George III, designed as a democratic republic where people could worship God as they chose. The Founding Fathers were men of stature and, though they were remarkably prescient in their capacity to write relatively timeless national documents, these, too, were class-based. Amendments to the Constitution have often corrected assumptions inbred in the Founders; among these the Three-Fifths Compromise (slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person). This was a compromise between the North who wanted to count only free persons and the slaveholding states that wished to use slave numbers to increase their Congressional power) and women as the property of men. Currently, our class distinctions are less hard-wired than those across the pond. But there are broad similarities. The poorer one is, the fewer one’s life options. Also, sadly, if we believe someone to poor, we can be quite unkind, although, as the current recession has proved, even our wealthiest citizens can become paupers overnight.
So, during a moment when he was being viewed by the world, President Obama might have been demonstrating simple human decency. Or he may have been a decent human being taking advantage of a unique situation to illustrate simple good manners. Obviously, there could not have been foreknowledge that this implicit or explicit lesson would have its particular international impact. That the bobby’s code of behavior would momentarily be put aside to allow him to shake Obama’s hand or to attempt against hundreds of years of protocol to reach for the hand of his own prime minister shocked many. Handshakes equalize people.
President Obama believes people to be equal and acts on it. President Obama, for example, lets his wife enter rooms before or alongside him as all gentlemen should, though as President, he now is expected to enter first. Prime Minister Brown also believes people to be equal but, as is the case with us all, he does not see this particular plank in his eye. That particular plank is part of being British.
And that is the take-away from this hand-shaking incident. Planks are cultural. They are familial. They are gender-based. They are, occasionally, self-imposed. However they occur, we must be assured that in this new New World, there are no little people. Just big planks. Just human blinders and human blindness. Just small actors and small actions. It must be our personal tasks as good people with egalitarian hearts to engage in deep self-reflection, to determine what might be hindering our capacities to see the humanity right outside our own front doors. And having seen it, to shake a hand, make a friend.
Published in Urban Life Northwest Magazine (http://www.urbanlifenw.com/)