In the well of understanding

In the well of understanding

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Why Americans are "hopeful" about Obama, Part I


We speak often of our national obsessions, and in the tallying of these we just as often lie to ourselves regarding the root causes. The provenance of this almost manic desperation toward hope, as a most apt current exemplar of this inclination, rarely (if ever) is given vent. The truth of the matter is that because of the retrenchment of civil, social and economic rights (indeed human rights in toto) under the Bush administration Americans have been eddying at a rapid swirl into the mire of hopelessness. Now this is held up as a banner for causality without acknowledging that it is merely the symptomatic denouement of the real cause: our collective irresponsibility in ceding the wielding of OUR power to leaders so that we can bemoan the fact, in apparent contradiction, that we are powerless to change what is done to us and done abroad under the auspices of this country. In a statement, we are hopeless because we have chosen to engage hopelessness in all aspects of our existence; and from this frenzy springs the unfettered end-run around despair towards the illusory smoke of hope. The consequences of our own irresponsibility are not some exogenous visitation from hostile forces beyond our ken. They are in every nuance the direct result of a dis-ease within the body politic, the body economic, the body social and all other forms of our manifestation as a nation. Bush is not the problem but a byproduct of the chemical reaction of our careless lab work; and just as no man is wholly the Devil incarnate, neither can one man be the angelic personification of peaceful and prosperous harmony in a society composed of a multiplicity. The leaders we have vested energy in are but a mirror reflection of where we are as a culture, and the window of our own soul is bared and waiting for us to recall the truth of what we hold; or in the absence of recognition and a choice to shift to a different experience, we will continue to be witnesses to what we have allowed and very witting participants in the manufacturing of our on-going hopeful/hopeless assembly line.

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