{"id":2788,"date":"2009-01-07T13:00:38","date_gmt":"2009-01-07T18:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=2788"},"modified":"2009-01-07T14:00:06","modified_gmt":"2009-01-07T19:00:06","slug":"in-the-wilderness-too-long","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2009\/01\/07\/in-the-wilderness-too-long\/","title":{"rendered":"in the wilderness too long&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<p><font color=\"#000000\"><em>The only thing I did was wrong<br \/>            Stayed in the wilderness too long.<br \/>            &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#000000\"><em>The only thing we did was right<br \/>            Was the day we began to fight.<br \/>            &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n<div><font color=\"#000000\"><sup>Eyes on the Prize&quot; adapted by Alice Wine<\/sup><\/font><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<p align=\"justify\">I&#8217;m not sure revolutionaries turn out to be the best leaders after they win. They&#8217;ve seen that something was badly wrong, and they&#8217;ve had the courage to stand up and fight for the just cause. It takes a single mindedness and a dedication. One of the main forces that drives such people is a sense of being right. I remember it from the sixties. Segregation was wrong &#8211; absolutely. Same thing with Viet Nam &#8211; totally wrong. We gathered and revelled in being &quot;right&quot; together. Our rightness was our bond &#8211; a band of brothers and sisters. God, I loved those days!<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><object width=\"255\" height=\"207\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/0ZWdDI_fkns&#038;hl=en&#038;fs=1\"><\/param><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"><\/param><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\"><\/param><embed src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/0ZWdDI_fkns&#038;hl=en&#038;fs=1\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" width=\"255\" height=\"207\"><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Unfortunately, there&#8217;s a down side to being right. There&#8217;s no such thing as right, even though there is such a thing as wrong. So, when you win, you want to keep being right, and there&#8217;s no right to be anymore. The ascendancy of the American Conservatives is an example of what happens to revolutionaries. The Republican Conservatives absolutely blew it under Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. They got thrown out in 1932, and it took them over a half a century to make a comeback. First Reagan in 1980, then the &quot;Contract with America&quot; Congressional takeover in 1994, and finally the whole government in 2000 [George Bush and both Houses of Congress].<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">For fifty or sixty years, they&#8217;d fomented about the way Democrats govern &#8211; weak conciliatory foreign policy, strong regulation of businesses, environmental mania, social programs, taxation of the wealthy, touchy-feely attitudes towards minorities &#8211; the list went on and on. Finally, they came into power determined to set things right. Instead of governing the country they had, they set out to change it into the country they&#8217;d longed for since their collapse in the 1930&#8217;s. What they did was a disaster and ultimately reproduced the situation that brought them down last time. It didn&#8217;t take them very long to fail. They&#8217;re already regrouping to be heroic revolutionaries together again. God, they love thinking they&#8217;re right!<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"> On our side, we&#8217;ve got a version of the premise that revolutionaries don&#8217;t turn out to be the best leaders after they win. After eight years of living in the wilderness and learning to fight, our critical [and self righteous] skills are honed to perfection. We won big time, but our criticism is still going strong. Why did Obama pick  Leon Panetta to lead the C.I.A.? Harry Reid is not going to allow Roland Burris to be seated in the Senate. Rick Warren doesn&#8217;t support Gay Marriage! Eric Holder was too vigorous in his banana case. The Atheists are suing to get get &quot;so help me God&quot; out of the oath of office. Lawrence Summers was wrong about Derivitives and Regulation!<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Creating an environment where Barack Obama could be elected President was a task that spans my lifetime. The heros of the Civil Rights Movement did their part. The blogosphere did its part too &#8211; hammering at the abuses of power under Bush. Enough of the Religious Right was able to see that their monocular voting was misguided. Barack Obama gets a lot of credit himself, for being smart, honest, and patient. I think those of us with a utopian, revolutionary bent would do well to back off on him. He&#8217;s got enough on his plate with the crazies left over from the Bush Administration. I&#8217;m particularly worried about Harry Reid. He&#8217;s been a good fighter, but I wonder if he can adapt his temper to being a wise leader for the Senate. Even the firebrands from the blogosphere are asking him to lighten up, and reminding him of the rule of law.<\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">What Obama is trying to do is create a unity in the sea of divisiveness that is Bush&#8217;s legacy. I&#8217;m going to miss being &quot;right&quot; all the time like I&#8217;ve felt under Bush. A part of me has really loved it, just like I loved the early sixties. But I&#8217;m thinking it&#8217;s time to pick my horse, place my bet, and cheer him on in the imperfect mess of a world he&#8217;s inherited. If he likes Leon Panetta, so be it. If Lawrence Summers made a mistake, I hope he learned from it. If Rod Blagjevich picked Roland Burris [instead of selling the seat to the highest bidder], then that&#8217;s what the law says he can do. Our problem is the whole attitude of Americans and the building economic Depression, not what words are in the oath of office or what Rick Warren thinks.<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><font color=\"#000000\"><em>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.<\/em><\/font><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The only thing I did was wrong Stayed in the wilderness too long. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. The only thing we did was right Was the day we began to fight. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. Eyes on the Prize&quot; adapted by Alice Wine I&#8217;m not sure revolutionaries [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2788\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}