Yes We Can! Long Island 2012
“It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent [President] Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed to him.” said Frank Rich in his Sunday Op-Ed in The New York Times.
Isn’t that the lesson that should have been learned after the 60s? yet that generation seemed to have put more faith in the elites of Wall Street and corporate executives than any other in history. Instead of working for the world many wanted in their youth, the generation became complacent.
Does anyone expect President Obama to change the direction of the world in a matter of months? Oil drilling has been known too cause cataclysmic environmental catastrophes for decades, yet any discussion of this was deemed idealistic or anti-capitalistic. If we listened to environmentalists in the 80s, drilling would have been a thing of the past by 2010.
For anyone paying attention to world events, as I assume Barack Obama has throughout his adult life, nothing going on in America since his election has risen to the level of needing true rage. Much more vicious and horrible events have taken place in just recent memory. World history has many dark corners, and it appears to me President Obama is keeping it all in perspective. One’s hair will get gray very quickly if each time they see misfortune they become enraged.
Yes, the oil leak is horrible, but not comparable to other suffering caused by oil companies in South America or Africa.
Yes, the crimes on Wall Street are destructive to our future economy, but the results were clearly visible on the horizon to many since 2002, so 8 years later, any true rage has dissipated to a frustration of the ignorance and gullibility of the many in America.
President Obama appears to be doing the right thing for the good of the nation, without getting much credit, and continues to get beaten up for problems that were not of his causing or for not implementing solutions that would fundamentally change the world that has been built during the past 3 decades. Without undertaking monumental changes over a long period of time, the backlash will be too great. We saw the irrational backlash to the modest health care reform package – that is a good gauge of the challenge of implementing change going forward.
Many in the nation would have been filled with joy and unflinching support for President Obama if he pursued prosecutions of the Bush Administration upon taking office. He could have let the big banks fail, which many would have seen as the right thing to do, until the results of those actions were seen. He could have withdrawn all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, but the result of those actions could be very negative for locations where we have already spent many lives. He could have cursed BP out on television for giving dividers to its shareholders, but what would that have accomplished?
President Obama has not even been in office for a year and a half, yet some want to judge him as if he is nearing the end his second term. The nation needs to take a deep breath, listen to what our President is saying, doing, and working towards, then when the late summer of 2012 comes around, we can judge his actions and decide if we will vote him in for a second term or vote for Sarah Palin or Ron Paul, or whoever the other party decides to run.
Deep breaths, America. Deep breaths.
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