Hope and Change
I miss the "brighter future" ahead.
I’m watching Obama era videos this morning. I’m sad.
It wasn’t that long ago that we had a Starfleet future ahead of us. A great and mighty existence of excitement and, dare I say it, of audacity.
Listening to Obama’s 2004 convention speech, and the way it introduced him to not only Democrats, but the world in general, is a storybook tale that with nearly any other human as protagonist would read like silly children’s fiction.
That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can tuck in our children at night and know they are fed and clothed and safe from harm. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door.
Then, what did “we” do?
The country that finally got around to standing up for one of it’s founding principles, that all men are created equal, by electing a guy who wasn’t a pasty white boy of privilege or fame, knee jerked like an angry ex-spouse with malicious compliance syndrome.
We went from a legendary orator to a babbling hate machine that somehow elevates racism, hate, and misogyny while managing to utter maybe one in one hundred complete sentences. A champion of rape, theft, deceit, and, frankly libertarian level selfishness and narcissism. A GUY WHO QUOTES HITLER WITH A STRAIGHT FUCKING FACE!
It’s mind boggling.
I used to be the guy. I used to be guy with flags on his car. I used to be the guy who couldn’t conceive of living anywhere other than America. I used to stand for the anthem, not out of habit, but out of obligation and reverence.
Now? Not so much.
Now I kneel, because I have a sense of obligation and reverence. It’s a juxtaposition I’m not entirely comfortable with, but I’m in the back if the room, trying to get a little last flame of Hope and Change.
It's that fundamental belief - I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper - that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one.
In the days of ancient Rome, travellers were safe to travel, or the wrath of Rome would follow. Basically, if a Roman were caused harm, Rome would cause harm.
You see it on the news, too, now. When an American gets hurt in a foreign land, it leads the news in the US. Why? Because we used to care if an American was attacked somewhere. We used to care. Now? Now there have to be qualifying questions as to whether Americans should care about other Americans. Are they woke? Are they gay? Are they coastal elites?
My LGBTQ family is under attack. My migrant family is under attack. The women in my family are under attack. The teachers in my family are under attack… everyone is under attack, even the right wing folks that are causing the problems are under attack, even if they are too thick to know it.
ASIDE: If Trump wins and we enter the inevitable dystopian future he’ll being with him; after the initial purge of artists, intellectuals, LGBT folks, educators, librarians, booksellers, and free thinkers, the rabid right will turn on itself. The desire to fawn and genuflect as close to the throne as possible to this Orange anti-Christ* will turn these close minded, power drunk right wingers against each other. If there is one thing that the evangelical right does better than anyone else … tattling**. The “bloodbath” Trump talks about is when his hate filled idiots turn on themselves.
It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!
How did we go from the promise of a hopeful future to once again putting the very soul of our Republic on the line? Trump made it fun, for the mouth breathers, to hate again. Boy, they really hate better than anyone else, don’t they?
How did we go from YES, WE CAN, to “no, YOU can’t?”
How did we go from infinite diversity in infinite combinations to Christian Whites Only?
How did we let the literal fascists get another toehold on the country? How did we let this happen? Hope and Change was intoxicating, but hate is a motivator unlike anything else in the known universe. Democrats and sane Republicans dropped the ball, that’s how.
We didn’t take it seriously. We didn’t believe that after achieving so much, that there were regressive forces in this country sleeping like cicadas, waiting for a clarion call to ignite their powerful fears of anything or anyone not exactly like them.
I’m voting Biden again this year.
I’ll save his achievements for another time, but I want to get this out: I’m voting Biden again this year.
ASIDE: I’m mad as Hell about Gaza, and the politics that are blurring the issue into a litmus test. Israel and the US made the fucking mess and should have cleaned it up decades ago. Hamas deserves to be wiped off the face of this fragile Earth, no question, but there’s almost 40,000 dead Palestinians because Netanyahu needs to stay in office to avoid the consequences of his criminal behavior. It’s not a fair trade. That’s Trump level stuff.
No, I’m voting for Biden because it’s bigger than him. It’s bigger than me. It’s bigger than you, but it’s not bigger than us. WE can choose to vote to save this constitutional republic, or we can protest vote our way into WWIII and the The Eugenics Wars, setting back any forward movement decades into the future.
We can avoid all that. We don’t have to settle. Biden is a stepping stone while we wait for AOC, or someone like her, to be old enough to be president. I’ve lost faith with GenX aged politicians, and the Boomers in Congress are as near to pointless as you can be while still drawing a government salary. The generations that should have fixed America’s ills never really showed up, and now it’s up to these amazing Millennials to save us from ourselves.
I’m voting Biden this year. Not because I’m excited to, but because I love my children, and I want them to someday feel about America the way I used to feel about America.
Hopeful.
… and this country will reclaim its promise, and out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come.
* I’m not being a Christofascist here, it’s just that Angry American Jesus Christ is the false figurehead of these chuckleheads.
** Minding their own business is a sin, I believe, in an evangelical America.