[This was originally posted as a private journal entry, but I decided to go ahead and share it.]
Rachel Ben-Avi: Dear Barack [via HuffPo]
The whole article hits me square in the gut, but ESPECIALLY the part I quote below. This expresses very well how I feel about politics and the possibility of change these days. I will direct my passions toward creativity, justice, and compassion and always continue to hope that lives can be positively affected. But I will never again buy into the notion that I can help elect a person to political office who is capable of bucking the system.
I’ll let Rachel’s words finish out my whine-fest, then be done with it.
My heart is broken, and this time the break is permanent. The disappointment is cosmic.
I am diminished by this disappointment, I am shrunk; my heart has folded in on itself like a psychotic origami, it is trampled beyond repair. Picture the blood wrung from it. Picture the just recently thrilled throbbing muscle, now empty, limp.
No, I am not waxing hyperbolic.
Put aside shattered love. Shattered love is an everyday occurrence; everyone has been disappointed, everyone has suffered the broken heart; but the tragedy here is: I have given up. The tragedy is deeper, more to be pitied than a broken heart. The tragedy is surrender. Shoulders shrugged, palms facing black holes. Multiply me by all the people who feel as I do, and we add up to a carpet of horizontal bodies stretching from shore to shriveling shore, too impotent even to sit up.
We shouted YES WE CAN, and actually believed it. Carried signs that said CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN.
We are stunned mute. We’ve thrown up our hands and trudged away into caves, to curl up, to “let” whatever happens out there happen. We had the illusion that we had input, but we are so far out of what makes change in this country, we might as well be ants.
I am a cynic now. You’ve had a real impact on me.
There will be no magical appearance of an even-better-than-Barack after you are done doing whatever it is that you will do. Or whatever it is that you will not do. And if, after you, there comes another image of one who seems like the real thing, I won’t fall for it. Not me, not ever again.
So, I was never infatuated with Obama, therefore I’m not sure what’s going on that has you so in a funk. Could you tell me?
Well, thankfully I’m not really in a funk anymore, but I’m also no longer an idealist hopemonger when it comes to trusting that politics and power will ever actually change. I totally bought into the notion that Barack COULD – and that with his momentum WE could – change directions and start doing things differently. But no. I can and WILL try to do good things and touch the world in any way I can from a personal grassroots small potatoes perspective. But as for thinking that one inspiring guy can change the momentum and buck the system … nope.
Like Rachel wrote: “We had the illusion that we had input, but we are so far out of what makes change in this country, we might as well be ants.”
A couple weeks ago I would have meant that totally across the board i.e. life in general. But now, I only mean it in terms of changing the country in big-picture terms through political engagement.
Personal engagement, though, is a whole ‘nother story.
Yeah, but what happened that this got triggered? I’m not sure I saw anything in particular in the news that would make me say, Yeah, that’s where he’s blowing off the whole campaign image.