hope and expectation
as you may have noticed, i haven’t written much lately– and it isn’t that I’ve been too busy, or that current events have ceased from happening. I’m currently experiencing such a deep pronounced rapid dissolution of my expectations for a world facing the right direction, that i’m having a hard time bringing into focus the particulars which need to have light shed on them.
i was never a huge Obama guy, but i held a secret hope that under his influence, the walls which buttress western style crony capitalism would undergo the kind of entropy associated with tectonic shifts beneath the surface of culture– i really felt like having a community organizer president who grew up middle class could have been the beginning of a shift in the hegemony of kleptocracy which has slowly replaced the government of rugged individual liberties that was our founding fathers democratic ideal.
but the new 100 days isn’t shaping up how my imagination had hoped- instead we have escalated war, even more blatant financial thievery conspired and created through the white house, a renewed focus on the privatization of education, strict adherence to a failed health care model, etc, etc. And if the facts on the ground weren’t bad enough, the general sentiment is that he’s doing a great job, and things are really turning around. My worst nightmare scenario is playing out before my eyes– the ideological trends which culminated in the Bush presidency and which drew such a heated electoral response from the masses has simply continued unabated. We have the same ideological underpinnings, rebranded, and everyone loves it.
What do i do with my anxieties when i have nothing hopeful to mix them with? Do i just come on here and spit invective? That process doesn’t quell the sickening feeling that reading the FT gives me. Times of crisis are times of change, and whomever has the best idea’s lying around will get them implemented, and i had true hope that some of the ideas inspired by the angels of our better nature would triumph-but where are they? Where is our single payer health care? Where are our rewritten farm subsidy laws? Where is our diminution of violence in Afganistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Iraq, Darfur, Sri Lanka, Tibet? Where are my accounting rules intended to reset the securitized assets to the realities of people’s credit card balances and foreclosure proceedings? How come we’re still denying visas to Islamic teachers with job offers at established colleges? Why are we claiming the ’states secrets’ defense in court preventing the due process of justice for the families of foreign innocents killed by private contractors? Why does our stimulus bill give additional tax cuts to rich americans when state governments are laying off thousands of employees?
i felt like my expectations for the ‘new’ administration were low enough; that i had hedged my bets. But now that a truth is being shown in actions which was capable of being obscured with words, my heart sinks, and my hope fades.