Yesterday I awoke before dawn with a kind of vision rolling around me. More a feeling than an image, it was a clear understanding of where we are now in the historical shifts of US democracy as it has intertwined with the world of finance, with individual social and economic situations, and with the basic human longing to fulfill one’s potential, so famously verbalized as the shining American promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I’ve heard these political movements described as pendulum swings from “conservative” (favoring the wealthy few) to “populist” (favoring the multitudes.) The pendulum analogy helps to see objectively the shifts that have been steering our country in this zigzag course for 200 years. But as I was emerging from that dream state, a more visceral analogy was upon me: I could feel the present shift as if we were all water in a great bowl, rushing from a near-fatal tilt towards conservatism – towards the realm of extorting and plundering robber barons, of greed, deceit, and the perversion of religion and national pride to blind half our citizens into accepting these power moves against them – to the populist side, where we can clearly identify those crimes and abuses of power and restore the controls that will allow the full rushing waters of The Rest of Us to live the American way, to discover and fulfill our purpose, to participate, to have what we need, to right so many wrongs and join in world efforts to become a wiser species of humans.
I confess that I used to be a moderate X-Phile, drawn in by the series’ underlying paranoid plot of government control – always a suspicion of mine since even before adolescence. So may I say now that if there really are a select few who manipulate the masses, I believe they would be aware of this natural flow to the other side of this metaphorical bowl. The current set of “leaders” in Washington has nearly destroyed our country with capitalism gone so crazy with greed it has turned on itself with the same Enron-like business plan that destroys companies for the sake of profit. Even the secret manipulators would say let the people have their way for a time, to keep us from becoming an unprofitable welfare state full of landless people buried in debt, without hope, and with too many guns; smoldering like the 50% of unemployed Iraqis who began to take matters into their own hands. How much further can the bowl tilt before we lose all the water?
Obama is so amazingly perfect for this shift. He does have hope. He has heart, and can express it eloquently. He has minority coloring, turning him into a symbol of the underdog rising to power. And the underdog is most of us now, no matter what our ethnicity. (I am Irish and German.) These rushing waters of the poor and the falling middle class can join forces to usher in a new age of interracial cooperation, an age of reason and love of nature and each other, a time to use resources for solutions rather than for increasing wealth.
Obama has to happen.
Yesterday I received the email with the big picture of Obama's plane, supposedly with his logo painted over the flag, with the heading "I could NOT believe this WHAT A DISGRACE!!!"
Besides all the things we could say about that if it were true, it seems actually not to be true. Here's the story from the Chicago Tribune:
"The president arrives in foreign countries aboard Air Force One with the words 'United States of America' emblazoned across the fuselage.
"Well, presidential candidate Barack Obama debuts on the international stage with a newly reconfigured campaign plane with its own distinctive message painted across it, 'Change We Can Believe In.'
"On the tail, instead of the American flag on the presidential plane, is the rising-sun logo of the Obama campaign. The repainted plane is likely to become a familiar backdrop for the remainder of the campaign. Previously, the campaign plane did not have a distinctive paint scheme. "
The piece contrasts Air Force One with Obama’s plane. It’s not that he painted over a flag. Someone either read it too fast, or altered the story to show him as unpatriotic, a recurring theme of the whisper campaign.
Everyone, please use this material to nip this new slam in the bud.
