Sleep is hard to find when, looking back, you see you've never been awake. No Utopia   ...W H A T ' S . A . S W E E T H E A R T . L I K E . Y O U . ....D O I N ' . I N . A . D U M P . L I K E . T H I S ?  HOME  COMMENTARY  ESSAYS/STORIES  POEMS/SONGS  LINKS Tuesday November 25, 2008........................................................................................................... Childish Things 3:37 pm | For me, anticipating the inauguration of Barack Obama is equal parts hope and relief. Hope that things will change, and relief that we will actually have made it to beginning of a new president's term without anything worse happening than preemptive war, constitutional erosion, a monarchical expansion of presidential power, blatant disrespect for the government of the people, systematic environmental neglect and degradation, a widening of the class gap between rich and poor, corrupt collusion between government and business, political corruption of the Department of Justice, chronic assaults on labor, economic near-collapse, the cynical manipulation of religion in the name of patriotism, phenomenal incompetence, prisoner torture, megalomaniacal arrogance, deceit, and …have I missed anything? Well, maybe just the fundamental (some might say) treasonous undermining of the image and interests of the United States in the world. I mean, the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Axis of Ego could've dropped the big one on Saddam (not to mention the USA's northeast, west coast, and everything short of the dozing midwest and cranky south) with congress and the media having barely let out a peep. Let's consider ourselves lucky. I do. There were many times during the past eight years I found myself muttering Dylan's, "There must me someway outa of here (said the joker to the thief), there's too much confusion, and I can't get no relief," -and every time I thought it couldn't get any worse, the daily news just upped my grief. So now, some relief? Maybe, but first, the gauntlet: here we go, fingers crossed, loins girded, some praying, most hoping, all leaning into a fierce wind, but with a leader, not just a decider. Into the wind, facing an economic cyclone of terrifying proportions, followed by everything else that has lately been avalanching into our idyllic siesta. Will we survive? It depends upon how much stomach we have for making real changes in the way we think and live. As the president-elect said in his stump speech, the election was not about him, but about us. In much the same way the last eight years were not about Bush, but about how stupidly and timidly the country let Bush reign. In an interview in Business Week the exiting president once quipped, "A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it," and given his administration you have to wonder if he didn't hope to make dictatorship a reality. Nevertheless, what he was expressing was the difficulty with democracy, because democracy is not always straight forward and immediately quantifiable. It's as quixotic as human nature and as hard to pin down. Speaking to the U.S. congress in 1990, Václav Havel, Czechoslovakian writer and first post-Soviet president of that country, said, " As long as people are people, democracy in the full sense of the word will always remain an ideal. One may approach a democracy as one would an horizon, and do so in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained." Now that the recent past has whacked us with a taste of the worst of it, maybe we're in line for the better. But it's up to us. It's up to us because (as Barack Obama expresses Havel's idea) democracy is a "conversation" -which Katherine McNamara of 3QuarksDaily observes is a means by which, "…the members of the polity work out their future, based on the Constitution" Perhaps, if we had not been so docile over the last eight years and caught up in fear and the luxury of anti-sacrifice; if we had demanded more of our media; if we had demanded more of ourselves, the crisis we're confronting might not be as varied, huge, and stark as it is. But we succumbed to the worst in us at the urging of the worst of us. We were sold a notion by ideologiocal hucksters that we could still be a nation to respect while disrespecting what had been respectable in us; that we could dismantle the constitution to save it; that we could have anything we wanted as long as we had the plastic to get it; and that we could suck the earth dry without sucking ourselves (who are of the earth) dry as well. St. Paul said, "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.." In that, at least, Paul was wise, but I wonder— having been recently so condescendingly thought of as children, and so willing to be treated as children, are we now able to put away childish things? Among the things we'll learn in the near future will be the answer to that question. HOME