August 3, 2008
Dear America
If you let John McCain paint Barack Obama as an uppity, elitist, effete, radical, shallow, flamboyant, muslim, anti-American, homeboy and you buy it so you can feel comfortable about voting for four more years — at best — of the same policies as the last eight, you are a sadder sack of shit than I once thought.
Yours, Patriotically,
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In other words, you will not be proud of America (for scarcely the first occasion in your adult lifetime) if America caves in to the McCain camp’s bilge. There. I got it right.
Nor will I. Nor will I be proud, is what I mean to say. More like ashamed. A familiar feeling.
The United States has the chance to self-correct in this election. How often is a person given that chance, let alone an entire nation?
Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States.
Yes.
The opportunity not only to say, “We wuz wrong,” but to turn the wrong around — that’s what’s needed. Yes, Cindy. I’m with you.
I will be equally appalled, but not entirely shocked. I remember 4 years ago, just after Kerry lost, there was a large online and offline campaign that went something like:
I know Barack is about 1000 times the candidate that Kerry was, but I wouldn’t put it past the majority to make another foolish decision.
It’s true; Americans have been broadly and deeply shaped by the rapacious desires of a few, who value something that smears all other values into a paste that is formed and painted, sold and preached upon, decorated with medals of war and then abandoned. Many Americans would vote for their own kidnapper and see nothing but good sense in the whole enterprise. We are a nation trained not to live examined lives. We once were a people who knew the virtues of thrift and of saving–dare I say of conserving–but now it is un-American to save, un- American to not spend more that one earns in ever greater amounts, on crap that falls apart in a day and makes another country (and those few) richer. Drive out into the “country,” any small town: tell me that you don’t see businesses boarded up all along what was Mainstreet. Tell me that they are now all making money hand over fist on Wallstreet. Is that true? Can that be true? No, they aren’t now getting rich. But let’s put banners and bunting over the plywood, let’s shake lots of hands. Nothing is impossible in America–when greed and wealth team up against those who had the chance for actual self realization pulled out from under them long ago. How far down the well must one fall before the simple need for water is recognized as not what’s about to be satisfied? If Obama is not elected, we will soon have no “strength” left to cling to but the threat represented by our nuclear capability.
Bravo, Daryl.
It was 1976 when the Sex Pistols were singing, “No future for you,” in the UK. I hope we are not singing it here in 2009.
“How far down the well must one fall . . . ”
That’s one that’ll stick with me.