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There’s that old cliche that says power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In President Barack Obama’s case, however, even his staunchest opponents will not use the word “corrupt” in the same sentence with his name. However, in his case, it is less corruption and more weakness. One can say, so far as Obama is concerned, that power weakens one’s resolve to do good, and becoming the head of the government of the United States creates a sort of burden that no ordinary man or woman can push aside and go along the way he or she and his or her admirers had dreamed for themselves.
May be that is the story of Obama and his and our shattered dreams.
There was a time when this nation – more in its youthfulness than in any particular flow of wisdom – dreamed of better days in the wake of the Obama mania. With the horror and silliness of the Bush years, and the final demonstration that this nation is run by corporate interests and the military industrial complex, people had grown weary and tired of themselves and their nation. So when the young Obama with his stunningly different background and outlook, and that brilliant flash of smile, came on to the political stage almost from nowhere, many people thought there was, after all, a way out.
Now these same people have given up on that dream as an illusion and learned not to think of the future morbidly. They have learned that President Obama is not a miracle worker. He cannot undo what has been done by generations of war mongering Presidents; he cannot undo what a parallel generation of greedy corporations and the military industrial complex have done to ruin the prosperity of this nation. So when we look at him working these days, we feel like watching a lost child, with all good intentions, doubtless, but without the strength to ride through the tide.
