Has.Obama.Providence.Enough?
Our champion enters the ring which made mincemeat of Carter and Clinton and road-kill of the Kennedys. He enters the ring of battle against the War Machine Money Power with a world on fire. To call human civilization dysfunctional is kind. The death of Abel at Cain’s hands is human DNA. We are not our brother’s keeper but his enemy, his overlord, his master.
This is the wisdom of ‘the beam in the eye.’ A clear view gives us the understanding we are, as John Lennon wrote, “he as you are he and you are me and we are all together.” But too many of us carry beams in our eyes. The beam of pride, jealousy, exceptionalism and entitlement. Tribe, ideology and religion. The beam is our truth. A fool’s gold.
Yet, after 10,000 years of human history, as the cyclists declare cycles, they cannot see the straight line from there to here. One truth after another proved nothing more than hubris, ignorance or folly. One can safely conclude based upon 10,000 years of evidence the human animal is, at the least, conflicted.
Collectively and individually.
And this conflict has continued unabated forever. And here we are at the climax. Human science has devised a million ways to kill humans. It has discovered cures to germs which can be had for a price. Human science in service to the profit motive has perfected the gun. But science is powerless against the human animal who picks up the gun and pulls the trigger.
The picture as it stands today is this: billions of poor and broke blokes at each others’ throats. As science and engineering have brought the art of war to the potential brink of human annihilation, politicians, in service to shadow interests, have perfected “divide and conquer” into an art. Humans are no longer human but labels of division. Indeed, the MSM takes this endless division and sells it as entertainment, thereby perpetuating the ‘normalcy’ of hardball crossfire sessions pitting spokespeople of division against each other for shits and giggles.
Meanwhile, soldiers are sent into battle against peasants and warlords battle over turf sharecropped by folks who make peasants look like landed gentry. Billions of human beings are allowed to languish in morbid poverty. Billions more work for a few dollars a day making crap for the billion or so consumers who are to human beings what puppets are to Pinocchio.
Civilization has always been a class-based society where the few receive the overwhelming benefits of the social order, while the vast many are left to dog-eat-dog it out in a macabre Orwellian, Darwinian, Machiavellian theme park called LIFE. Consent is manufactured through propaganda and economies are stimulated through hysteria.
It is in this Blade Runner, Total Recall, Matrix landscape from which Obama finds himself risen to the high Office of the President.
I did not vote for Obama because of his politics. Once Kucinich became the Iceman Cometh pipedream he always was, politics was off the table.
I chose to support Obama from the remaining candidates because I came to believe he was the superior human being. A man of virtue. Someone with principles, ethics and morals.
A creature of the machine but, like Picard, never fully assimilated into the BORG. A man with the character to withstand the masters of dehumanization and never lose his quintessential human characteristic: Humanitarianism.
Obama is our champion. And this is our moment.
We know what needs to doing: Provision.
To Provide.
Providence is the foresight necessary to overcome the obstacles erected by special interests and entrenched power, and to provide the people with the tools required for us to achieve common wealth: Liberty, Truth, Justice, Equality and Transparency. Men and women of good faith operating with mutual respect and understanding of human fragility.
Does Obama have the providence? Is he prepared to do more than tweak corruption, fiddle with dysfunction and modulate passion?
Will he play it safe; practice the prudent politics of incremental change or will he be the ONE? A champion who ushers in a new era of human possibility and returns daylight to the nightmare world of gorgon-gothic, neo-conservative, Bush/Cheney fascism.
The signs are good. Obama appears ready. His words today echo his campaign. Only a mobilization of the People, with Obama as our champion, can lead to the systemic change necessary to re-focus the nation on its virtuous principles, dismantle the war machine and begin to grow a society based upon the ideals envisioned by Washington, Jefferson and Paine.
Obama should do more than reverse the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war, torture, unlawful detainment, denial of habeas corpus, repeal of posse comatatus and other broadsides against the Constitution. He should also reverse the greasy slide of corporate greed and profit-at-any-cost mentality which demotes demotic power to nothing more than servants of capital and slaves of wage.
Obama knows the challenges. He is prepared for them. He has shown providence in his sober approach to hellacious problems. Not all of his signals are clear, but those which are bode well for an effort to move past the darkness of the last eight years and, if not bring the perpetrators of high crimes to legal justice, to at least shine a light on their crimes for all to see and to swear it never happening again.
Obama has said over and over he is not a perfect man and will not be a perfect president. I believe him. And that’s why when he is less than perfect he will not mind if we remind him of the ideals which swept him into office. He wants nothing less than to perfect this union. To realize its potential. To build a nation based upon human ideals and laws which rise above the petty, mean and ignorant proclivities of men with power.
Hope is what he asked us to do. And hope is what we did. And hope is what we will continue to do.
And, if everything goes well; if the people do more than watch the spectator sport of politics; if we do more than bitch and moan when the inevitable walls of privilege and entitlement are fortified and staffed by arms and guile; if we do not accept defeat, but continue to struggle until our reality is matched by our hopes and expectations – if we do these things, then hope will turn to happiness.
On one side is a champion backed by the peasants and on the other side is an army of excuses why change is impossible. The champion will challenge the entrenched system time and again and time and again will be rebuffed. Only the steadfast support of the people behind the champion will give him the courage, fortitude and strength to battle until his last breath. To win or die trying. That’s what champions do.
And if he falls, one of us or a million of us will pick up his mantle and charge the barricades again. We will win or die trying.
Because, these are the end-times of the old ways. We enter a new age. And we have the power to make it what we want for once and not just fall under the sway of warlords, princes and men of god which has been our way for 10,000 years.
In the new world, if this world is not meant for destruction, humans will govern themselves with good will towards all humans.
The American Revolution was not the final battle between the human aspiration to life and liberty versus tyranny, but the first shot in an on-going battle which has now reached a new moment. We have seen the emperor with no clothes. We have witnessed the hollow, dead and destructive nature of the elites. We know, in the midst of financial Armageddon and human apocalypse, now is the moment.
Our champion is in place. The people are ready for battle. And our expectations are high.
The enemy will continue its attempt at division and the sowing of strife. They will belittle, scorn and scoff. They will attempt to break us financially and spiritually. They will counter-attack with a vengeance.
But all is for naught. It is a new age. The enemy is running on fumes. History is on our side.
Beginning tomorrow, the future is here. Make of it what you will.