THIS LINK is to a piece written by Marianne Williamson, writer of many bestselling books about interpersonal, societal and spiritual matters. It is a lament by the writer on the first year of Barack Obama's presidency. It is painful, but yet necessary to consider that perhaps looking to political leaders is not where real change and evolution of consciousness can come from. As I've been saying for a long time - change can only occur one person at a time until we reach "critical mass" and the "Hundredth Monkey" effect can kick in.
Here's are some excerpts from Marianne's post:
"What the current administration is giving us is minimal change. And not because the President hasn't had the time to do better; if he had truly wanted to make fundamental change, he would have gone in there fast and done his own version of shock and awe in the first hundred days. And not because he didn't realize how mean all those Republicans can be, either; Obama knew what he was getting into, and if he didn't, then he was as unprepared for the job as his opponents said he was."
"I remember Bobby and I remember Martin. I remember when there was a moral force at the center of the Democratic Party. I see it sometimes still, in a Sherrod Brown, a Dennis Kucinich, an Anthony Weiner. But they're not reflective of the general tenor of the Democratic Party anymore, and I think we would all do well to wake up to that fact. We elected Obama and then he sort of became someone else. He's doing a lot of good things in various areas, but he's certainly not changing the new bottom line: that corporations get to run the world. He bailed out the banks, but he didn't stipulate that they had to start lending again. He got us health care, but he wouldn't say a word about single payer and he wouldn't raise a finger for the public option. He won the Nobel Peace Prize, but accepted it with a speech that was an apologia for war."
"In 'Healing the Soul of America,' I wrote about Ghandi's notion of soul force in politics and why it matters to stand on your truth. Should we re-brand the Green Party, or draft another Democrat to challenge Obama in the primaries in 2012? I don't know what we should do, but I know one thing that we shouldn't do: pretend to ourselves that this man is delivering on what he promised when he first won our hearts.'
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See... yet again... I said this the day after he got elected, http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=33996149562, and I'll keep saying it again, why we ever thought that Obama was going to be a liberal president is just beyond logic and quite frankly the facts. We deluded ourselves into believing that. If we're upset that he's not meeting our expectations, quite frankly it's because our expectations were way off the mark!!
As I wrote then, and I'm still writing now, every platform that he stood on was a centrist one. No Gay marriage, continuing the bailouts, continuing the wars, etc... Even healthcare reform! Let's be real, a liberal solution to healthcare would be a Universal Healthcare system. Even the House bill which so far is the most left leaning, barely holds onto a "Public Option". Have we completely lost our perspective. "Optional" is SO far from "Universal"!!!
Thinking that Obama was gonna' be like a Kennedy or a Dennis Kucinich is just plain delusional.
The irony for me in all of this is that I like to consider myself a centrist, (leaning to the left for sure though). But having a centrist in the White House with the stubborn obstructionist Right Wing in the minority, we're not getting any centrist policies. Even the Right Wing has convinced themselves and their constituents that he is way liberal!!! So now his liberal policies (actually centrist policies) are under fire and are going to get modified to the right. The lesson for me being that if I want centrist policies I have to vote for real far left liberals. Imagine if Obama had strongly insisted upon Universal Healthcare. Might then the compromise be a "Public Option"???
Anyway, sorry to go on a rant, but those on the left side of center really need to understand what they're dealing with. It's really easy to equate Democrat with Liberal, Republican with Conservative, but the bottom line is that there are many, many shades of Blue and Red. Just 'cause a guy calls himself a Democrat doesn't mean he's not purple. If he's telling you he's purple, if all the facts say that he's purple, don't turn around and get all upset because he's not blue enough!!! DUH!
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