Every time I switch the channel to CNN, MSNBC, PBS or BBC America, on every political blog I read, and with every right click of my mouse to yet another news link, I am reminded of just haw many days, hours, minutes and seconds are left before Barack “Blessing” (for that’s what “Barack” means) Obama takes over from the Biggest Loser in the modern history of the Oval Office.
A part of me wants to remind the American people that their country - and most of the world along with it - is still falling apart, despite the fact that they may be tired of hearing it and anxious for the kind of let’s-pretend-nothing-is-happening kind of news and entertainment they’ve been fed for decades.
Yet another part of me is a little bit (okay,very) annoyed with this extreme anticipation for Bush to end his reign of terror, incompetence, and theft and for the reasonable, eloquent, empathetic professor to take over, as if the American people could do nothing but hold their collective breath and wait.
But does the responsibility of every American to clean up the mess they were complicit in creating when they elected Bush - twice - end with having (finally - and only just) elected the better person for the job, as opposed to the guy they’d most like to have a beer with?
If all the people of the United States do is hold their breath and count down those final hours, minutes and seconds then they can hardly consider themselves worthy of the promise that is Barack Obama at this moment in history.
It may seem hard to decide when to stand up and fight, and when to turn the other cheek, but that’s only because we the public have had every one of our senses shocked and assaulted into submission, using every dirty trick in the book for so long, that we were reduced to playground politics as opposed to the kind of politics that are mulled over, debated in much of the rest of the world. Where others take up arms, we pick up the remote control. Where others have died, we fretted over which color of iPod to buy, whether a $900 pair of shoes was worth the splurge, and just how big of a car we could afford to drive.
Wouldn’t be nicer, more civilized, more American, to let Bush go quietly into the night without having to face his role in the holocaust-in-the-making that is Iraq? The reintroduction of the torture debate in co-called polite society? The fleecing of the national treasury? The dumbing down of American kids so they will be less able to participate in an economy that’s gone completely global? The depletion and desecration of every natural resource you can think of? The embarrassment on the world stage of epic proportions otherwise known as Katrina?
No. No,no, no, no, and, hmm, let me think…. NO.
When Bush was elected a second time, most of the world washed its hands of an America that had squandered a second chance at getting things on the right track again after a monumental blunder. To quote the Great Illiterate himself, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, er, ah… you can’t fool me twice.
As the institutions and ideas of social, economic and racial justice the boomers, gen-Xers and millennials inherited from the Greatest Generation all lie in ruins, can all the political activism we can muster be boiled down to one simple, finite act, that of casting a vote for the obviously more qualified guy? Do we get to pat ourselves on the back for electing a black dude when no one in the world thought we’d finally get over ourselves and our complexes, and join the twenty-first century?
Is that the best we in 2009 can do?
From the despair of the thirties emerged welfare, a minimum wage, and the beginning of a kind of consciousness that moved us from the era of every-man-for-himself to that of we’re-all-in-it-together.
From the ashes of World War II arose the United Nations and the understanding that our continued existence on this planet depends on mutually assured safety, not mutually assured destruction.
From the struggles of uncommonly brave women, today’s girls can opt to be Superwomen, traditional women, meek women, strong women, women who take on the world in stilettos and pink lipstick, or women who raise the next generation in sweatpants and scrunchies, all the while having achieved something men never have in millions of years of world domination: transcending the confines of gender.
From the grief of a nation reeling from the assassination of a great black leader, after much pain and patience, was born he next leader of the world’s only superpower, the child of two penniless dreamers, one white and one black.
And now, we stand at this moment in history, and dare to call it of our making.
If we let Bush and his gaggle of elitists in small town folks’ clothing, his masters of double-speak and his robber barons get away the greatest heist in American history, then we have effectively spat upon every single achievement of our predecessors, and are in no way worthy of any part of the promise that a president like Barack Obama just might fulfill.
When Obama addresses the nation as its president for the first time, he will likely allude to the long, hard road ahead. That journey along that road begins with George W. Bush’s moment of reckoning.
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