Dear President Obama,
The election results of November 4 were undoubtedly depressing for you. With the Republicans now controlling the entire congress, it means you’ll be much grayer by 2016. It means you will be using executive veto more often. It means you’re being blamed for events and circumstances over which you had little or no control.
This is the first time that a sitting president’s hometown governor has lost since 1892.
In 2008, my husband and I waited three hours outside a Fort Lauderdale venue to hear you and Joe Biden speak. Your audience was hungry for change. We were blown away.
By 2012, when you were re-elected, when we voted for you again, we were disappointed that many of the changes you had promised had not panned out. You set the bar too low for health care coverage. Instead of setting the bar at Medicare for all, you included the insurance companies by making health care mandatory. The insurance companies salivated at the opportunity to sign up 50 million new clients. Gitmo remains open to this day. Yes, you got us out of Iraq – sort of – and are supposedly going to get us out of Afghanistan. But you were too conciliatory with the Republicans, too willing to engage them, and all they did was stonewall you and everything you stand for.
The media pundits are calling the Republican wins tonight “a wave,” as in a tsunami. It’s going to be a wave, all right, a wave of utter disaster for the middle class, for health care, for any hope of a raise in the minimum wage, for more tax loopholes for corporations, for more of the middle class descending into poverty, for more war, more of the U.S. as the world cop, for more stonewalling on climate change. It’s going to be a tsunami for the unborn, who will claim “personhood” even though they are no larger than a comma in a womb. Well, you know all of this.
So, while greedy capitalism is going to flourish, when trickle down economics will resurge, the planet will drown, the economy will shrink, the Republicans will cut Medicare and Social Security, the elderly and the poor and the young will stagger. As one of my writer friends emailed me tonight: “I will never understand this country. If I didn’t already feel half dead, I’d hang myself.”
I know what he means. In the next two years, we may find ourselves living in a Philip K. Dick novel like Blade Runner. It’s one of the grimmest Dystopian novels ever written, where corporations are the true kings and the rest of us are as disposable as Kleenex.
The media pundits are calling this a “rejection of the president and his policies.” But as a Republican strategist said, “The Republicans don’t really have an agenda except to reject everything that Obama wants.”
We are pretty much screwed for the next two years. The old paradigm, it seems, is not going out with a whimper. And unless the Democrats run a powerful candidate in 2016 – Elizabeth Warren instead of Hillary Clinton, for instance – we’ll have four more years of Republican policies that benefit the one percent. And in the end, the one percent will be the only ones who can afford bunkers they’ll run to when the oceans rise, when the planet rebels, when the poor and the disenfranchised take to the streets. It will be the opening paragraphs of The Road, a Dystopian novel by Cormac McCarthy that won the Pulitzer prize and that might be more depressing than Blade Runner.
If I could afford to move to another country, I would.
Best,
Trish MacGregor
P.S. I apologize for the tone of this email. Tomorrow when the sun rises, when the perfect Florida weather dominates, I hope it will be easier to look at the bright side.
Thanks to you for this………it made me feel a little less alone and sad.
This morning I was forced to sit in a doctors office with Fox news blaring. There was some kind of group of very attractive, well groomed women discussing the election, and one of them actually said “Well, this shows that people are fed up with all the nonsense and fluff, like “women’s issues”, and we’re ready to get on with what matters.” (by this she apparently meant jobs, the magic Republican word, even as the TPP is being secretly fast-tracked through Congress, assuring most people of a choice of bright future careers at Walmart and MacDonalds for $6.00 an hour, if they’re lucky.)
Coming from a time when “women’s issues” were not considered “nonsense”, and living in a country where, so far, women don’t have to wear burqas, and can still vote, I was shocked. Really shocked.
It’s not “just women’s issues”. It’s also “just the environment” and “just education and healthcare” and “just human rights” and “just climate change” and “just freedom of speech” and “just” about every other thing that has made us a great country, rapidly disappearing……………….
Fox News is the most disgusting and damaging news outlet in existence. You should’ve asked the to change the channel- I wouldn’t be able to sit for five minutes with that channel blaring!
The ones that are so high on winning will be despised soon. No one will escape the anger welling up in the American people for perpetual war, corporatism, militarization of the police, and lack of anything resembling equality. As you stated, Obama has not been just a bystander in this – the NDAA was passed during Christmas break while most Americans were not paying attention, the Monsanto Protection Act, and his expanse of executive privilege are all on his watch. Not to mention GITMO, rising health care coverage as a handout to big insurance companies who track us like cattle, drones that kill innocent people in far-off lands in the name of security.
We are broken. Both parties are broken. They are merely two sides of the same coin. It needs to run its course and then the people will take it back, or die trying.
At least people who couldn’t get insurance before can get it now. The problem is that not all states expanded medicaid, which was supposed to be part of the affordable care act. It isn’t parties that are broken – it’s the government, the paradigm as it has existed and stumbled along since Reagan. Bush started the expansion of executive privilege, got us into iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9-11, and pretty much blew up the mideast. He opened gitmo and not a single person in his administration was ever charged with war crimes. That’s what Obama should have done his first week in office. I don’t think both parties are different sides of the same coin. Every piece of legislation that actually helps people has come from the democrats, not the repubs. But at this point it’s all such a mess that you’re right about it having to run its course.
I think Katherine Austin Fitts and Richard Dolan, et al, has it right – we have a breakaway civilization running our world and they have their own agenda.
That’s a REALLY interesting way of describing it. Have you read The 5th Wave? That’s how I felt today…
No, but I have it downloaded on your recommendation. The theory of the breakaway civilization is quite interesting, and could possibly explain many things – such as where all our tax dollars go…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMn8NCGVUV0
A heart felt email, Trish. I can’t comment further, it’s not my business – though I suppose it is in some ways, as what effects the US will to a degree affect other countries as well.
Sometimes I feel concerned about our (British and perhaps US) democracy as the main aim of most politicians is to win the next election – it’s very much short term politics and not long term for the good of the country.
I just feel kind of numb. People don’t connect the dots and end up voting against their own self-interests.
Politics leave a bad taste in my mouth. Don’t do it.
Unfortunately, everything is politics.
I always look for the silver lining in the dark political clouds…and any dark cloud, for that matter. Now the Republicans will have to do something. They have two years come up with some real ideas, not just stalling and blocking to make Obama look bad. If they can’t pass anything worthwhile for the middle class, they’ll have a bad time in ’16.