Something Positive
May 28th, 2008 at 1:07 am by Chris
This line from Obama’s stump speech actually means something to me.
I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.
That captures something really important that dirty fucking hippies, like me, have been moaning about on the internets for the last six years. My jaw still doesn’t work quite right from having the lower portion of it spend so long on the floor while watching the horror show that led up to Iraq. I just hope the dude actually means it.
Not that I expect results to write home about. The stupid is petrified and it runs a few miles deep in some places. The dude isn’t superhuman. Maybe he doesn’t even care. Maybe he just pretends to get it. Whatever. We’ll see. Just trying to be positive about the candidate I support. Feel the love.
I don’t know about Obama, but I kinda know about you, and I can believe in you.
Which I guess means it’s time to take personal responsibility, or some other stupid thing.
Good post Chris. It’s one of those things I hope Obama means when he says it. We’ll see, as you say. At least he put that out there.
and he is absolutely right about the need to do some serious cleaning in the foreign policy bureaucracy.
we need a real neo-con purge.
I wish he would also hit it from a competency perspective as well.’
so much incompetence that needs to be accounted for.
Well, not to cast glumness over it, he didn’t say ‘the’ war. I was convinced, up to this primary season, that W had turned me into a pacifist. But I know that if I were 18 in 1941, I would have most assuredly marched off to war. But not for Korea, Vietnam, or most especially Iraq. For ages, and simultaneously for most of my life, the idea of ‘changing the mindset that got us into war’ has been in my mind, but unfortunately, what I have seen in this campaign has not convinced me that there is real reason to hope the longing of ages is imminent. Indeed, hope has a kind of smelly meaning now!
I’ve commented before that we dropped the ball, my generation did… we stopped The War!
Our War. Viet Nam.
But we didn’t stop War.
We forced Nixon to accountability. Whoopee! Nixon quit, The War is Over! Let’s finish our law degrees, cut our hair, and buy beemers and half-million dollar houses on the high desert!
We stopped The War. Our War. Viet Nam. But we didn’t stop War. We finished our law degrees and bought overpriced McMansions, and left the machinations in place, notably Bush/Carlyle, Cheney/Haliburton and Rumsfield/etal, that led to the Authoritarian State - the Fascist State - we are about to, if not have, become.
If Obama…
I really really want to feel the love. Saw Stevie Wonder at Jazz Fest in NOLA last month. He pours the Obama shtick on pretty thick…maybe someone was smokin a doobie and I was downwind but I was ready to vote for him right then and there. Pass the Oxycontin please…
I’m apprehensive about the change that Obama will bring but I’m looking forward to the old guard being removed. And yea, my jaw’s still soar from dropping on the leadup to the war. Chomsky said once that the March ‘03 anti-war protests was not only the largest war protest ever but the first time a war was ever protested before it even started. Interesting. And with all of that still nothing changed nor would it ever in the reign of King George II.
I’ll also be happy to see the idea monolopy gone and doors open to fresh ideas. But we’ll see how fresh. Untill then I’ll be carving out my little nook here.
I still don’t get how WE stopped the war.
The ones who stopped it were the combined forces of the People’s Army of Viet Nam and the People’s Liberation Armed Forces of Viet Nam rollling into Sai Gon in nasty second hand Soviet tanks.
That’s when that war STOPPED.
April 30, 1975.
Not a dirty f**king hippie in sight.
(Not even me, ’cause I was one.)
I’m still waiting for some genius DFH to explain to us low-information
DFH’s how the “greatest mass anti-war movement in American history” produced America’s longest war???
Hmmm. Jeez. Cough.
Sorry, I keep bringing this up.
I can’t help it.
eunice: no Oxycontin please! If you turn into Rush Limbaugh I’ll die.
Wobbly: Please don’t be so pedantic. The war of the United States of America v. North Vietnam ended in Jan. 1973.
It’s a hugely complex issue I haven’t the time to explain but our making the second-largest foreign policy mistake ever (the War in Iraq is #1 - Vietnam a close second) in no way shape or form makes the butchers in the North heroic, right, or moral.
Why did we leave? If you think the pressure of the anti-war movement was the reason or no reason you are wrong. If you think it was one of many reasons, albeit an important one, you’re right.
Peace.
Stevie Wonder will make you feel the love, won’t he, in a general way. His skills have possibly eroded a bit with time (as usually happens), but he’s still got the magic. Must’ve been a nice concert! I love the way a good concert can make me feel so positive about the world, like all things are possible.
Stevie Wonder For President!
Then he should get behind The Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq. (responsibleplan.com)