THE FIRST HUNDRED DAYS are over, and what have we got to show for having put Barak Hussein Obama in that chair behind Kennedy's old resolute desk, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Has Darfur been dealt with? Have we altered our despicable policy of unquestioning support for (or is that iron-fisted control of) Israeli aggression and brutality toward Palestine? Is the nearly fifty year, criminal embargo against Cuba lifted, and are we looking to stop (or is that stop profiting from) Rawanda-style genocide around the planet? Are we going to punish everyone who committed atrocities and torture against Iraqis and against a dozen other foreign nationals in our American torture chambers in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, and many other secret CIA torture facilities across Europe and Latin America and perhaps even within the US? Are we moving toward properly addressing the devastation in New Orleans finally?Too many of these situations have yet to be resolved, and as Obama continues to falter in his campaign pledges to provide 'transparency, justice, and change', we are asking, is Obama worth the sacrifices, struggle and work we went through, and the blood-sweat-tears we shed to get him behind that desk?Dick Gregory reminds us of some important contexts we had better bear in mind as we measure the hundred day shoes Obama is walking in at this point.Given what Dick points out about the real CONTEXT of these times, what should our attitude toward Obama be? Are we perhaps being too utopian in that we expect things of him? Should we expect anything from him just simply because he is (supposedly) Black?Much of the responsibility for change, should be OUR responsibility (Americans and African Americans specifically, should be marching, protesting, shouting, demanding that the president of the united states (WHOEVER is president) stand for the humane and the just, or, frankly, there will be no humane or just society; its as simple as that. Obama's election was not our chance to rest on our hopes, but rather simply the oepning battle in a long, long struggle--"A PROLONGED STRUGGLE THAT MUST TAKE PLACE" in the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu at the height of an anti Apartheid struggle in South Afrika.We should not necessarily expect Obama, who all his life has been a well meaning ELITE (Harvard, political office in Illinois, then the Senate, and now the Presidency) to stand against corporations, the military, and the political establishment that allowed him to take power, for any real change or substantial shift in the commitment of this countries resources away from war and wealth and toward the poor and the oppressed. We should expect a frustrating demonstration from Obama of the typical left centrist politician's application of caution and pragmatism. Well meaning pragmatism, yes, but revolution? No.Oh, you aint know?? Yeah, oye, , Papi, Si, companera, revolution happens in the streets--it will not be televised from the White House press briefing room with the neatly suited Barak leading the way. That yoke is ours, and ours alone, to carry--through the streets.Grace Lee Boggs (in an interview on Air America during the campaign, and again on "Democracy Now") has warned that we have to forsake our dependence on 'charismatic leaders': she points out that almost all of the charismatic leaders of the 60's were gunned down. This left us without a plan, without an engine, without direction, because we had conditioned ourselves to be followers."Leadership has within it, the complexities of followship; and followship is not what we need. We have to become the leaders we are looking for in relationship to our local, daily circumstances."see Lee-Boggs' interview on "Democracy Now" for her exact words on this matter:'If we want to live in freedom from terror' as Lee-Boggs puts it, we must MAKE Obama do what we want, just as with any other American/Capitalist/corporate elected official. The American population grew complacent after the post WWII boom, and since the end of the Vietnam war, has grown progressively more ignorant and lazy (at least the middle classes have, including the Black bourgeoisie). Under these conditions, if Obama did everything we intellectual and revolutionary elites want him to in the name of the Socialism, and Marxism, and feminism, and anti-globalism we all believe in, much of the US electorate, the masses, would not even understand what the hell he's doing or why!Should every president who is progressive then, commit political suicide in their first term so that we have to start all over again to build a political movement to elect the next progressive and in this way elect one paltry progressive every twelve years or so, until consciousness somehow spontaneously appears in the US citizenry?How are we going to change ourselves? How are we going to stop the terror perpetrated upon our lives and upon our childrens' lives by corporations and finance capitalism, and hunger, and unemployment? How are we going to take back our childrens' minds from the cults of celebrity (Beyonce's no-talent ass) and of consumption (Nike, and Sports Authority, and prison culture that they glorify as they also seek, in the words of Eric Dyson, to "eroticize violence" while raising death to a cult of worship?Obama's election is an occasion to challenge ourselves, just as earlier generations had to challenge themselves, knowing that Lincoln might have freed us, but that we were on our own when it came to building a Black nation for ourselves; that Johnson may have passed the Civil Rights Act, and Voting Rights Act, but that we were on our own when it came to forming a coherent, disciplines, and committed electorate and polity; that Clinton may have hired dozens of Black faces into his administration, but we were on our own when it came to making those Black faces work for our betterment and not for Exxon's.We now must ask ourselves these difficult questions, and not just blame our plight on Obama. These questions are part of the realpolitik of the US corporatocracy. What is our role in changing this? Shouldn't we stop even supporting this idea of a 'president'? I was clear, or at least it was clear in MY mind, that I was voting for Obama not because he was Black, but because we had to seriously consider the fate of the human race and of the planet if Republicans were allowed to have four to eight more years to wreak havoc, torture, war, terror and destruction. I thought of Obama as an alternative to the US invading Cuba, Korea, and Syria and Iran and fighting seven endless wars after drafting my damn daughter to fight those wars!I had no illusions about Obama. I originally supported John Edwards, who was more radical, and thus, he was sabotaged by the media, as they started to do with Obama and Reverend Wright. Under capitalism, how can a presidency or a congress ever even function for the good of the people simply out of a sense of magnanimity?Well, first of all, we need election reform and laws against corporate money in the electoral process and in lobbying our elected officials.Next, we have to ELIMINATE the military industrial complex, and castrate the pentagon! We spend BILLIONS of dollars every year on missiles, nuclear warheads, and jets and military bases we maintain across the Earth. Billions that could easily end world hunger, green the farmlands of Africa, restore the Amazon, and end the Israeli-Arab conflicts by CREATING arable, fecund farmlands out of wasteland in North Africa, in Texas, in China, and providing land and food for an independent Palestinian state.Obama has made no statement about this--no president can, possibly, without risking his position or even his life.Is the union movement (which does have a history of internationalism, with the IWW) a key? Can the union movement in America perhaps join with the global environmental movement, and with the anti-globalist movement to forge an international consciousness (thus removing much of the power over populations that corporations now have with their evil practices of outsourcing, canceling commitments to pay out retirement benefits to their already retired workers, avoiding profit taxes, and avoiding worker rights and living wages through control of global labor)?And so, it is perhaps in our best interests right now to stop blaming Obama for being what he is, and instead focus on the Employee Free Choice act (see ) being passed into law as a first step in a difficult but necessary process workers here in the US must take to eventually rebuild the global radical union movement and drive it toward another era of internationalism, and a reviving of Marxist politics and Trotskyism.These are questions about strategy, and our need to take responsiilty for our own freedom, not about our preoccupation with individual rulers, even well intentioned rulers such as Obama.We need to stop seeking out hush money from our presidents.
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