In her new book, The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, Michelle Obama writes that more than anything else, people who come up to her want to ask about the seven words that came to embody her political outlook after she declared them at the 2016 Democratic National Convention: “When they go low, we go high.”
As Stephen Colbert put it when he sat down with the former first lady on Monday night, what they really want to know is, “Do we really have to ‘go high’ when they go low?”
“Now?” Obama joked in response.
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“I totally understand going high when somebody goes low,” Colbert told her, “but the bar is so low that staying at your own altitude still means higher. Do I actually have to go up here or can I just be normal? Do I have to be a saint? Because down here, I’m pissed off!”
Now that her phrase is “everywhere”—including novelty items like coffee mugs and T-shirts—Obama felt it was time to explain exactly what she meant.
“For me, going high is not losing the urgency or the passion or the rage, especially when you are justified in it,” she said. “Going high means finding the purpose in your rage. Rage without reason, without a plan, without direction is just more rage. And we’ve been living in a lot of rage.”
She feels there’s no choice but to “go high” because the opposite is “unsustainable.” If going low “worked,” she added, “we’d do it.” It might be a “quick fix,” but “it doesn’t fix anything over the long term.”
“I’m trying to push us to think about solutions that will actually unite us and get us focused on the real problem. That’s what I mean when I say ‘go high,’” Obama concluded. “So yes, go high. America, please, go high.”
