The question, of course, is: Can Barack Obama succeed. The answer, alas, is very simple, namely that he can succeed if people are prepared to put special interests aside for the sake of the country. If, instead, each special interest group sees Obama as a ticket to have their special interests met, then the answer is very, very, very clear: Obama will fail and he will fail mightily. Alas, Barack Obama is not a magician. Instead, he is only a person. So it is even if he is the first non-white to be elected to the office of President of the United States.
Can Obama succeed? Of course, he can if the people of the United States should take seriously a simple idea that is to be found in the Pledge of Allegiance: “We are one nation”. Of course, the entire sentence reads: “We are one nation under God”. For many people, the very idea of God amounts to just so much nonsense. Be that as it may, nothing will change the fact that the people of the United States need to take seriously the simple reality that the United States is one nation.
The members of every special interest group should come to the political table with something significant that they are willing to sacrifice for the good of the country, given that others are doing the exact same thing. If the United States goes under, then everyone loses and everyone loses in a most significant way.
I said that every special interest group should come to the political table with something significant that they are willing to sacrifice for the good of the country. This means that even minorities and other groups who believe that they have been socially shortchanged must be prepared to give up something. Other than the profoundly ill—no group is allowed to maintain its agenda just as it was before.
Can Obama succeed? The answer is very simple: He can succeed only if every group is willing to make the kind of sacrifice that I have mentioned.
Will Obama succeed? I am afraid that I am not optimistic in this regard. I am not optimistic because we have turned being a victim into a form of art. There is something completely incongruous about rappers going on and on about being a victim of racism while they are making millions of dollars in record sales. Even if they are only making hundreds of thousands of dollars, they are still doing extremely well.
I am not optimistic because we have acquired a talent for blaming any and everyone but ourselves for anything that goes wrong, no matter how foolish our own behavior might be.
I am not optimistic because basic commonsense has been cast aside in the name of feelings and a sense of entitlement.
Finally, I am not optimistic because a deep sense of responsibility has been lost.
Taken together all of these shortcomings make for a social climate that is the equivalent of drowning in one’s own vomit. It may be true that all the others are terribly imperfect. But unless we should happen to be equipped with wings, we need to acknowledge that we have no claim to being any less free of shortcomings than others.
The French newspaper Le Monde observed that no president has ever occasioned as much hope as Obama has done. That seems clear enough. But the question that needs to be asked is this: What exactly is the nature of that hope. Is it the hope that if one works hard and takes responsibility for one’s actions, then one will succeed? Or, is it the hope that one will succeed regardless of one’s irresponsibility because a new day has come? Is it the hope of inspiration that lights a path under our feet? Or, is it the hope of expectations which, like hot coals, burn through our moral resolve?
Obama will succeed only if groups in America and the American people generally will take themselves seriously enough to be responsible towards both themselves and others.
Obama will succeed if we lower our expectations of him and raise our expectations of ourselves. For then and only then do we give him a political and moral gift with which to work for the good of the country.
This issue is not about forgetting the mistakes of the past. Rather, it is about not letting the mistakes of the past become fertile ground for the mistakes of the present and the future. The claim is that if we forget history, then we are doomed to repeat it. The claim is not that by remembering history, we thereby obligate ourselves to re-live it.
Can Obama succeed? Only if we are more interested in working for him than in having him work for us. Will he succeed? I would that I could respond with a resounding “Yes”. This is but another way of saying that I would that he could have the absolute highest expectations of the American people. For if he could, then success will surely be at the very finger-tips of the American people.
What is every American and every American group willing to sacrifice for the sake of the country? How we answer that question is the key to both his success and the nation’s and therefore our own success. Can we stop bickering amongst ourselves and blaming others just long enough to see, appreciate, accept, and act upon this truth?
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