A Loss of Insperation

I think that maybe we blame Obama because we’re mad at ourselves. And we should be. We were inspired when he started out and then that inspiration faded. We blame him. But inspiration is just the start of the relationship. When a writer gets inspired, do you think she can write a whole book just off the inspiration? That there aren’t grueling nights and moments where she isn’t sure where her book is going? Do you think she doesn’t work? Relationships start out with passion but when the passion isn’t overwhelming anymore and returns to normal level, people either discover the best parts of the relationship or they bail because they’re “not feeling it anymore.” Passion should always exist in the relationship but it’ll never stay at that new and exciting level because eventually it isn’t new and exciting anymore. Eventually it’s something better or we let it fall by the wayside.

That’s what we’ve done to this presidency. We were inspired. Impassioned. We were ready to take on everything we knew was wrong with our country but as soon as work was required, we bailed. We said that we weren’t inspired anymore and Obama should inspire us. He’s had to claw through so much just to get a semblance of what he wanted passed, passed. Things that we said we wanted. We said we wanted Universal Health Care and then when it became complicated and harder to understand, when Republicans or others fought it because it might hurt corporations or the insurance companies because somehow they have more rights than people, we bailed and the law was changed and faces more gutting now. We said, “Well Obama, you said you were going to do this so you better do it or we’ll be mad at you.” We said this as if the President controls everything in government. As if we aren’t the ones with the opportunity to control congress.

When Obama called for a change, it wasn’t just for congress or for government, it was for us. Everyone. It was about changing up the entire system. Changing to a system that treats people like people and doesn’t value one person over another. It was about saying “Yes, we do need corporations to stimulate an economy and provide a workforce but not at the expense of people. Corporations don’t get to make all of the money and then decide that the workforce that actually creates the product gets so little of the profit. Yes, the CEO is an important role and should require a decent salary but if you don’t have the assembly line worker, you don’t have a product to sell in the first place.” It was about us using our power to make sure that the people we elected, actually treat their electorate like people. 

Aren’t we tired? We all seem so tired. Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Socialists and everyone else with a brain is tired. So why aren’t we doing anything about it? All of us? We’re so tired of it and yet we keep letting the same people who’ve been governing for decades, govern. Then, we elected a new guy to be the head of it and dropped the support once he got a little dirty. Government is dirty. Life is dirty. Anything worth doing is dirty. It’s how we know we’ve done something worth doing, when we compare the grime on the face and the mud on the knees. It’s not that I think Obama doesn’t have some blame or that he hasn’t screwed up in places but that putting it all on one person isn’t fair.

Maybe we put so much blame on the President because we can’t bear to put the blame on ourselves. We’re the cheaters in the relationship who blame the victim because they didn’t support us enough. They didn’t give us enough attention and so we had to cheat. We’ve gone in defense mode. It’s no wonder we had such a low voter turnout for the midterms. Things are easier when you’re the underdog because if you lose, everyone was expecting it anyway. But when we were handed a chance to actually get something done, when the passion faded and the real relationship began, we quit. We quit and we threw the blame everywhere else. When did we become such defeatists? 

Of course, you may disagree with him and think that everything he’s tried to do is terrible but you can’t deny that for one election cycle, people cared. So many people got involved, stood up and said “I want to be a part of this.” But it turns out that most just wanted to be part of the victory party. We can put the blame wherever we want but I have no doubt that we had a chance. We had an opportunity. But man, did we blow it. 


*Note: I've not had a chance to run this through some other people's brain first but I decided to put it up anyway and I'll just deal with other people tearing it down. Also, I actually voted for McCain so...