What I didn’t anticipate is how hard it would be for me personally to believe in "change," to have "hope," to think "yes we can." I knew that it was going to be an uphill climb out of the Dante’s Inferno that Bush created and reigned over for the last eight years. I think I’d even recognized that my fantasy of "the last eight years" was really just that – a fantasy. The Clinton era didn’t really undo the twelve years before, nor did the Carter interruption undo the eight years before that. The Nixon/Reagan/Bush I/Bush II Dynasty is the force that has really set the tone of the country since 1968 – spanning the majority of my adult life. I was naive to want that not to matter.
It’s left a mark on me, and today I felt the gloomy pale over this endless transition period. This financial collapse didn’t help my attitude much. It wasn’t the dire consequences that got to me. It was the sleaze. Bush running to Congress for the enormous emergency Bail-out, and then the Republicans saying, "See, the Democrats are bailing out the Banks, but not the workers." The Bail-out now feels like just another trick. Bernard Madoff sure didn’t do anything for my mood. And the huge Corporate C.E.O. bonuses haven’t added. Now I read they’re going to lend that money to the superfluous Hedge Funds that sit in the middle of the problem. I think the corrupt Bush Administration had me on the edge, and this encounter with the greedy Wall Street/Corporate Executive layer that’s been underneath it threw me into the emotional toilet. I wanted it to be over, and it feels like we’re not even to the starting line.
In this cloud of discouragement, I recalled something from September 16th, 1963. I was at a lunch counter next to the store where I worked. In a few days, I was getting on a train to go to Medical School in a place I’d never been and knew no one – leaving college, friends, girlfriend, and most of what I knew as life behind. I picked up a loose newspaper while I waited for my hamburger, and read about the bombing of the 16th Street Church in Birmingham the day before that had killed those four little girls. I don’t know what to call what I felt as I read that story, but the other times I felt it were when President Kennedy was shot a few months later, when I found out that same December that my childhood friend, David, had been killed in Southeast Asia, and in 2001 when I watched the Twin Towers fall in New York.
I grew up in the South and was sympathetic to the Civil Rights Movement [as sympathetic as someone who was still a kid and into whatever being in college is about]. But it had never really touched me like it did that day. The entire place where I had spent my life suddenly seemed all wrong, and it was. There was no white light or dramatic external change that day, but in retrospect, on the inside I was different. After that, I wasn’t sympathetic to the Civil Rights Movement, I was part of it. I guess that day I became a political being. I don’t recall that I knew if the South would or could change. I was still young and that didn’t matter to me. I had changed – that’s all I knew.
Something that always worried me about the Bush/Cheney Administration was that after all the awful things they have done and are still doing would go unpunished. Lo and behold I read what Biden says on ABC yesterday about focusing on the future and I got very upset. I just sent VP elect Biden an email saying that their unlawfullness needs to answered or it will happen again. I don’t want revenge as much as I want our system of gov’t to work and that means I want justice for all. Bush/Cheney have acted as if they are above the law and I don’t want them to be proved right by the Obama Administration.