I have some friends who tell me that President Obama is no better than a moderate Republican, that he has failed to live up to his campaign promises and stand up to the bad guys, we should back somebody else in the Dem. primaries or start a third party or even begin thinking about revolution. Beyond the question of whether they are correct about Obama’s politics (and I don’t believe that), there is a broader response to that position:
You need to get some historical perspective. Let’s say you had a time machine and you could go back to the late 1700s and sit down with the smartest guys in America just after the Revolution, and tell them a little bit about the USA of the 21st century. You tell them that not only are black people not slaves, but that they can (usually) vote, and so can women, and so, in fact, can every citizen aged 18 and older who’s not in prison, and that in fact the President of the United States is a man whose father was from Africa and whose mother was Irish, of all things, and whose name is Barack Hussein Obama. Tell them that almost everybody has a car, and a refrigerator, and a TV set, people routinely live into their 80s and 90s, everybody can communicate with most people in the world over something called the Internet, using something called computers, and using something called telephones that they carry around with them everywhere they go… after they stopped laughing, some of them (maybe not Jefferson) would probably tie you to the back of a horse and ride you around a while. If you survived that, you could put them in the time machine and take them back to the Middle Ages, where they could sit down with some of the leaders of that unenlightened day and tell them that not only does everyone agree that the earth is round, not flat, and not the center of the universe, but that you come from a country on the other side of the ocean, where people (well, white men, anyway) vote for their leaders, there are no kings, the church and the state are separate… and probably before they got that far, Jefferson and company would have their eyes plucked out and be burned at the stake as witches.
Yes, we have bad guys. We have always had bad guys. Life is an eternal fight between rich and poor, good and evil, jocks and geeks. But it wasn’t that long ago that those bad guys could just come to your house, take your daughter away and rape her, steal your cattle, burn your house down and take your land, and nobody could say or do one thing about it. Today they can still do most of that, but it requires something called “due process,” and they don’t always get away with it, and sometimes your story appears in the news, and the bad guys are punished. And you don’t live in a dirt hovel with rags on your back. You have a car, and a color TV, and a cell phone, and a refrigerator. You might even have a good job, or at least a job, and health insurance. An average guy from the Middle Ages would kill you and suck your blood in an instant to have what you have. In 200 years more, things will be even better — that is, if a bunch of morons don’t start a revolution and blow it all up. Or if we fail to get enough progress on climate change to prevent everybody from just drowning eventually. Not that I personally have a stake in that, but my great-grandchildren might, if I ever have any.
So my answer is: Calm down, get some historical perspective, vote straight Democratic, and hope for the best. In the meantime, make sure your Visa is up to date, just in case. You may not think our current administration is all you’d hoped for, but if 2012 turns out to be 1980 all over again, you might be thinking about trading places with the guy in the dirt hovel. The left/moderate orgy of destruction in the face of a united right wing looks all too familiar. We need to get a grip. We should take a page from “The Walking Dead” (if you haven’t seen it, I recommend it): Stop arguing about who did what to whom, and go shoot a zombie in the head.
