Week of 07/05/2010

Hope Is Not Enough!
– by David Matthews 2

Hope.

Hope is…

• One of the spirits in Pandora’s Box that was considered “too evil to be let loose”.
• A comic book character that is supposed to be the salvation of the mutant race.
• A soap opera character on “Days of Our Lives” that used to be a part of a hot super-couple and now has a split personality.
• A political party in Slovakia.
• A programming language from the 1970’s and 80’s.
• An overused word for a concept that has no meaning anymore and that its use actually makes this commentator sick to his stomach to hear it.

You can figure out which version applies here.

I am tired of hearing about “hope”. I really am.

Hope is blind optimism, plain and simple. It is a belief that things will somehow get better.

Once upon a time, hope was good. It was healthy. It was needed. We spent seven years living in fear and despair. We NEEDED someone to bring a message of hope that things would somehow get better.

And it could have been ANYONE with that message. That’s the thing that conservatives and neo-conservatives failed to understand. The real secret behind Barack Obama’s success in the 2008 Presidential Election wasn’t just that the Bush Imperium was too tyrannical and the GOP were too corrupt and the economy was just too screwed. It was also a matter of the MESSAGE itself! Obama could sell that message, and he did just that all the way to the White House.

And for a while, it worked. People could carry on with that sense of optimism, that idea that things would somehow get better.

The problem is that hope only works for a little while. It’s like caffeine. It gets you pumped up for a little while, but if you’re already running on empty, you WILL eventually crash, no matter how much of it you consume.

You see… at some point, the promise of change and the promise of a better future needed to translate into ACTUAL change and an ACTUAL better future. It wasn’t enough to say that change was coming. Obama and his people had to BRING that change. They have needed to actually DO better, not just promise better, and they haven’t done it.

Change? Every attempt to change the way things operate in Washington has been cosmetic. Wall Street didn’t want change. The banks didn’t want change. The big corporations didn’t want change. They all loved that ongoing plutocracy and kleptocracy. Every proposal for change had been neutralized and negotiated away. And even when those changes were passed, as mediocre as they were, Big Corporate made sure that the American people SUFFERED for it at EVERY opportunity!

This is an administration that promised hope and then was sold hook-line-and-sinker on the FAIRY TALE of a “jobless recovery”. Obama is preaching that we’ve “turned the corner” with the economy. The good news is that he’s right… the bad news is that it is the corner of a cliff, and we’re heading OFF IT!

Oh yes, Obama got his token recovery program passed in 2009. And then he followed through with his political playbook and moved on to Iraq and then health care and then financial non-reform.

And yet despite the rhetoric, we haven’t really been getting any better. The smaller banks are still failing. Foreclosures and bankruptcy are still marching on. The job market isn’t really improving. Americans are still suffering, and things will only get worse.

To make matters worse, thanks to the Lenin-style mechanizations of the GOP and the gross incompetence of the Democrats in Congress, what meager unemployment assistance that currently exists is disappearing, not just once, not just twice, but repeatedly, month after month. And this is accompanied by the continual gloating and boasting and taunting by the saboteurs themselves, mocking the very hope that they have successfully managed to destroy with smarky little statements like “How’s that hopey-changey thing working for you?”

But in truth, they are able to get away with it, and to be pompous asses about it, because the people who PROMISED those better days FAILED to do their jobs in the first place. The Democrats KNEW about the nature of the GOP. They KNEW about the abusive nature of the corporations. The first time around could be considered a learning curve. Anything after that, though, is nothing less than indifference at best and malicious apathy at worse.

Let’s get brutally honest here… hope is not enough in this world! Hope does not pay the bills. It doesn’t put food on the table or keep you out of foreclosure or bankruptcy. It doesn’t do anything except give you encouragement.

Hope has an unwritten promise to it. Giving someone hope for a better tomorrow means that at some point, you have to do what you can to make that better tomorrow happen. You can’t just say that things will get better over and over and over again, especially when there is every indication of the opposite happening.

One of the cruelest, the most vile and despicable tricks in the world that one human can pull on another human is to give them a sense of hope, a sense of optimism, of something good happening to them, and then once they are given their trust and loyalty and fidelity, and firmly believe of that “something good” will happen, sit back and watch as that hope is dashed. There are people today who take great joy in playing these kinds of games. I’ve seen them first-hand. I’ve been a victim of their mechanizations. And that is what seemingly is happening today.

Hope is dying in America, if it hasn’t already been smothered to death. It is dying with every screwjob perpetrated by Congress. It is dying with every corporate criminal that doesn’t get indicted. It is dying with every layoff notice and every report of bad news. The longer this goes on, the more that hope dies in America.

And the question that the Obama people need to ask themselves is this: do they REALLY want to be around when hope finally and completely dies in this country? Do they REALLY want to be here when despair rules the day? Because when the people who are filled with despair start looking for someone to be held to account for it, the very first group they will look at are the ones who gave them hope in the first place.

In the meantime, I am sick of hearing about hope. I am sick of hearing about false and empty promises. If Obama and his people are even the slightest bit sincere about wanting that better future, then it is long since time to stop talking and to step up and actually deliver.