Oprah Winfrey Interviews President Barack Obama

The magazine “Psychology Today” has defined nostalgia as “sentimentality for the past, typically for a particular period or place with positive associations but sometimes also for the past in general, ‘the good old days of yore.’”

Though I don’t prefer to be thought of as a sentimentalist, watching Oprah Winfrey interview the former president, Barack Obama, about his two terms as chief executive of our nation as he describes it in “A Promised Land,” a 701-page treatise on his eight years in office, I did find myself longing for a sturdy hand guiding our ship of state (this is the first volume of a planned two volume tome of reflection on the 44th president’s life in and surrounding his terms in office).

In a candid discussion with Oprah, Obama admits that after a grueling campaign mixed with the adulation of cheering crowds of tens of thousands of people “The ego part of it didn’t interest me anymore. What interested me was what I could get done.”

Despite the birtherism controversy, wherein Obama was accused of not being a legitimate American citizen and, therefore, constitutionally prohibited from holding office as president of the United States and Senator Mitch McConnell’s hard-woven commitment to make Obama “a one term president.”

President Obama’s executive skills, nonetheless, succeeded in pulling the economy back from the brink of a collapse that could have been as devastating as the Great Depression of the 1930s; implementing the Affordable Care Act — AKA, Obamacare, which provided 20 million people with health insurance coverage; and ordering and succeeding in the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

“The worst day” of Obama’s presidency, he confesses, was the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn. that ended the lives of 20 children and six teachers on Dec. 14, 2012.

“I was disgusted and appalled by the inaction (of Congress),” Obama said. “Because you had parents who had just lost their children sitting in front of senators and asking them for some very modest, reasonable approaches. This wasn’t some radical agenda. They were asking for more effective background checks and other provisions to keep firearms out of the hands of disturbed folks.”

It was a “human moment that we should’ve been able to respond to as a society,” Obama added.

Sadly, it seems as if our nation is more polarized now than then and, perhaps, more divided now than since the 19th century American Civil War.

Maybe the initial step in mending our fractured and fragmented country is leadership that seeks to soothe the pains of hatred and division seen across these United States, rather than pouring salt into the country’s raw, exposed compound fractures.

Oprah interviewing Obama is currently streaming on AppleTV+ and through the innovations of technology both appear to be sitting across from one another but she’s in Santa Barbara, Calif. and he’s in Washington D.C.

(The Beachcomber welcomes feedback on this and other issues.)

ben@beachcomber.news