JoB
I want someone to explain something to me….
WSmom shared with me that she had decided to back Obama because he had captured the interest in politics and excitement of her child.
There is a female democratic senator who said much the same thing…
And then in Newsweek i read a piece by the son of Joanne Atler.. a real life hero for breaking the gender barrier in chicago politics… which nearly concludes with this:
“When my two sisters became active Obama volunteers and her granddaughters as well as grandsons grew excited about politics for the first time, my mother began to think about the contest in a new way. The next president was for them, not her, she reasoned. Slowly idealism edged identity.”
the general philosophy behind all this seems to be that idealism trumps all else in politics…
(i have chosen to let the idea that the only reason to support Hillary is gender slip past with only a mention).
This reads too much like a song inspiration for me.. What the world needs now…. is idealism?
I know that those of us who are my age would love to put politics and reality on the back burner right now.. this is not the world we thought our idealism would lead us to…
and quite frankly.. it didn’t work out so well the first time… other than ending the war in Vietnam and watching Richard Nixon dig himself deeper and deeper into what really should have been criminal charges… life didn’t take and idealistic turn…
as a nation, we seemed to brush ourselves off.. say we were done with that… we got our gestures.. and went back to business as usual.
Affluent blacks and women did gain a lot from our idealism… and we have made progress as a nation in some areas…
but we obviously were not done with sensless war or with the underground war against women, blacks, immigrants, the poor .. in other words.. anyone in our society who wasn’t white, male and well educated… oh.. and affluent.
We have allowed our government to make a mess of things… Our economy is in trouble. Our environment is in trouble. Our health care industry now provides us marginal health at maximum prices. We are at war.
I am all for idealism.. but wouldn’t it be good to actually straighten out a few of these problems first.. before we hand the torch on to our unsuspecting children and grandchildren? … who idealists that they are… think they will do a better job than we did.
Somehow, this seems wrong to me.