Carolyn Baker: Your Disappointment in Obama is Your Teaching Moment

[GliderGuider]

Your Disappointment in Obama is Your Teaching Moment

It's the end of the affair, and the stale taste of limerence stays on your tongue. You were promised the sun, moon, and stars, and you desperately wanted to believe it was real, especially after the betrayal of your former relationship of eight years. You had considered escaping-riding off into the sunset to another country where he couldn't find you, or so you hoped. You feared for your children and what he was setting them up for. You feared for yourself in the face of his brutality and intrusiveness into your life. Though you wouldn't admit it, you secretly prayed for assassination or some elaborate exposure that would take him down.

Then along came Mr. Wonderful with his irresistible smile and infectious inspiration. He wooed you with his charm, that smile, and his engaging discourse-so articulate by comparison with the unintelligible babbling you had put up with for eight years. He cared about you and your children. No longer were you alone; like Martin Luther King, he had a dream-a dream congruent with yours, and the passion you both shared for the dream was hypnotic and felt deeply spiritual. You actually thought that he was a messenger sent from another world to rescue you and take you out of the nightmare. He used transcendent terms like "hope", "change", "yes we can." And not only were you totally surrendered to his embrace, but you begged everyone else to do the same. He's our only hope, you told them and yourself. You could scarcely contain your ecstasy when they all chose him in the last hours of the eight years you had all excruciatingly endured.

But today, you ponder reflectively the past year, and what you have now come to understand is that the hero you married is a prisoner. You believed him when he told you he was free and at liberty to make the changes he proclaimed. You trusted him, committed yourself to him, and fought for him. And now you discover that he's betrayed you and that his actions really aren't that divergent from his predecessor's. In fact, he is a prisoner of the same forces that terrorized you for the previous eight years. Fooled again. Betrayed. You sink into despair and depression. You talk to your friends-the others who also believed in him. You feel those old and familiar emotions you felt from 2001-2008 that you thought you'd never have to feel again. "What can we do?" you ask. "What are our options?"

In this teaching moment, those disappointed and despairing of their tryst with Obama have a golden opportunity to ask themselves what his betrayal of them reveals regarding the political and economic systems of America and the reality that no politician can even be nominated for the Presidency by the two-party monstrosity, let alone elected, unless that candidate is permanently dressed in his or her NASCAR uniform. If you do not ask this question, you will continue living out the definition of insanity with every national election because you refuse to look deeply at the fundamentals of how the corporate state functions. You will cover its rotting stench with come cloying cologne of "hope" and thereby not only enable your betrayers but waste precious time by not attending to life and death issues.

More at the link

[tom_paine]

1. The unreccers are onto you, GliderGuider

They're gonna make sure that this awful straying into Unorthodoxy sinks on down to the bottom ASAP.

Know what's funny? I didn't NEED this teaching moment, but got it anyway.

I WANTED to believe and eventually let myself be talked into it by well-meaning friends. The funny thing (and this plays into the reality of "primate nature", many aspects of which you and I have discussed many times before) is that, even KNOWING what I know now, I am not sure I would trade in The Lie for The Big Truth.

I guess I am just as shot through with primate frailties and egocentric nonsense as any other of the nearly 7 billion Intelligent Monkeys on this Earth. Not that it's any surprise to me.

Don't know if you've ever ready it, but "Cat's Cradle" by Vonnegut, is a novel which illustrates the paradox completely, accurately, and quite entertainingly.

Without going into details of the plot, two of the laughingly contradictory lines from the "book inside the book" of Cat's Cradle.

"Don't open this book. It's a tissue of lies!"

and

"Live by the lies that make you happy and healthy and true."

I always understood it, but such was my attachment to reality and the truth, no matter how disturbing, I am not sure I ever so fully LIVED it until Obama came along and I gradually shut off my "reality detectors" in order to believe a lie (or half-truth, if Obama really is just a well-meaning guy who is hamstrung by a corrupt and moribund system).

Why did I do that? Because it felt GOOD and because, as Baker intimates, I needed a break from the unflinching gazing at a reality during a time of pre-collapse.

And for perhaps the first time in my life, I wouldn't trade away the months of "good feelings" for the truth.

Now, as Obama goes into his "pivot", I am given the opportunity to embrace the lie or, to be fair, the well-meaning-half-truth-that-has-no-possibility-of-prevailing.

As Homer Simpson was so fond of quoting (and what could be more fitting in a nation of Homer Simspons?), "Lousy brain!"

[GliderGuider]

2. Yes, they are. Not entirely unexpected.

I'm having an inner battle these days over my desire to know the truth.

It's true that our egos -- driven by comparison, judgment and preference -- prefer pleasure to truth and that predisposes us to discounting unpleasant information. However, recognizing that truth can lie in unpleasant facts can lead us straight into the opposite trap. If we come to see the ego as the great deceiver, then its preference for pleasure can be judged a deception, and so only unpleasant facts are accorded the status of Truth. Enlightenment is the ability to be present to what is, whatever it is, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, accepting both and preferring neither.

I felt Obama's Hope, and reflected that in several articles on my web site. However, even as I watched his inaugural address I was realistic enough to understand that there are larger forces at work in the world than a mere president, and to accept that some of those forces are dark ones. As a result, I don't feel betrayed by the current situation so much as vindicated by it.

The hope is real, and it has been an important influence for waking people up to the awareness that "We deserve better, dammit!" That is a truth that will have far-reaching consequences for the individual and collective decisions people make in the coming years. At the same time, it's also true that there are forces behind the throne that prefer to remain in the shadows, whose interests are not ours, and whose influence transcends party lines and even political systems as a whole. We do ourselves no favours by discounting those in our fixation on hope. Both sides of this coin are equally legitimate and need to be acknowledged in our search for Truth.

Recognizing both of these effects as we struggle to understand Obama's situation will lead us to a more balanced version of Truth than we will achieve if we discount either of them.

[IrateCitizen]

3. Perhaps the late, great Howard Zinn could teach us something to this end....

I've been leafing through my well-worn copy of A People's History of the United States over the past day or so, and it has reminded me that his greatest value lay not in being a historian, but in being a human being who was always willing to stand up against injustice -- even at the threat of harm to himself.

At the end of the Afterword in the edition I have, Zinn summed up our current predicament pretty well in 1999 -- as well as the solution:

Yes, we have in this country, dominated by corporate wealth and military power and two antiquated political parties, what a fearful conservative characterized as "a permanent adversarial culture" challenging the present, demanding a new future.

It is a race in which we can all chose to participate, or just to watch. But we should know that our choice will help determine the outcome.

(emphasis mine)

No matter how powerless many of us may feel today, it was at least as bad during the heights of the Gilded Age. Yet, then, people banded together and fought like hell to gain improvements in the lives of most "regular people." Our powerlessness exists only so long as we continue to view ourselves as individuals railing against the machine. If, instead, we begin to view ourselves as members of a vast sea of people disillusioned and angry toward the status quo, and begin to think and act not as individuals, but as members of that vast group, then there IS possibility for a better future.

People who maintain their faith in the national electoral system and candidates like Obama are hoping for a political savior to come and rescue them. Zinn taught us better than anyone -- through his writings AND his tireless personal activism -- that there are no saviors. It is up to us -- not a bunch of individuals, but people acting as members of a larger group -- to create a better future. Zinn concluded his 1999 afterword with a verse from Shelley:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you --
Ye are many; they are few!

[glitch]

4. Deserves its own thread. Thank you . nt

[Vidar]

5. K&R.

[northernlights]

6. thank you so much for this GliderGuider

I discovered your post 1/2 hour too late to rec. I will K&R, though.

Funny, I was reading through the top of her article and thinking, the solution is local. To co-exist (and defend against) with TCPTB, and to live and focus locally. And by midway or so, that's where she was headed, "buy out of the putrid, perfidious American political system and buy into making your local community resilient and self-sufficient."

I never bought into the "hopium," and "change we can believe in" was such an empty slogan it amazed me how many people thought it had some meaning. I did, however, cry when Obama was inaugurated, to see a president sworn in who was not a WASP male was something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime. And I was somewhat hopeful early on, that with democratic control of 2 branches of government, the direction we've been dragged down would change.

No such luck. I won't be voting again, at least not in a national election and probably not in any election. Unlike Baker, I did vote in 2000 and 2004, because I believed (and still believe) we would have had a very different decade with Gore instead of the bushlet. And of course in 2008 for anybody but Bush. Obama was my last choice from the list, but time has shown that it really didn't matter which of the very flawed candidates was annointed. It's all a sham and, frankly, a waste of time and effort.

We won't get fooled again.