Encouragement (thoughts from 2008)

These are difficult times for us.  They're difficult, because we Americans think we need to be optimistic.  And when times—like these—are chaotic...for every small up, there's a larger down, for every common sense, logical statement, there's a longer, more convoluted, absurd and nonsensical statement...optimism seems to be hiding.  We've achieved longer lives, which we will now fill more with work than with pleasure. It takes courage to search for optimism right now.

The good news is that encouragement and optimism still survive.  The less-than-good news right now is that they survive outside our borders.  The things about Barack Obama that everyone could agree on are that he represented hope rather than fear, alteration rather than stagnation, actuality rather than mythology and veracity rather than mendacity.  As general Powell said, he indeed, represents transformation.  And who realized this?  According to a contemporary survey of 22 nations by the BBC, the voters in those countries preferred an Obama America by a 4 to 1 margin.  And—here's the important part—nearly half said the election of Obama would fundamentally change their perception of the US.  The optimist remaining in me assumes that means they would have regarded US at least as a respectable nation.

On the other hand, I feel seriously that we must increase our vigilance toward the way some people among US reacted to the Obama hope.  On her way home from work last night, my wife caught some of Michael Savage's and Bob Grant's bile.  These monomaniacal troglodytes push their withering envelopes to such outrageous levels I can assume only that they want to discover at what point their apostles will finally lose interest.  But they never do. These seriously troubled listeners keep heaping praises on these two haters and feeding their nefarious ends.

But I'm not worried about the two troglodytes.  I'm worried about those lonely loser denizens, fearful of change, of the loss of their "dream," of  "that one" and those ones and, finally, of difference.  I can feel in my bones how daytime stopped for an entire weekend when JFK was assassinated.  I felt the same thing only more in shame than fear when MLK was assassinated. Then Bobby Kennedy was taken down.  And that final blow I think created my loss of hope and optimism for a very long time.  As history has shown, we have been numb for 40 years.  This is not the legacy we want.  

We can't talk hope alive, and we can't shout fear down.   It takes vigilance, identifying with cultural purpose and—more than anything—the certainty that people are more important than any bottom line.

(P.S.  2017 The troglodytes have metastasized and the audacity of hope has withered into crusty audacity.  The center does not hold, and the people who should realize that don't have a clue.)