Article: If Bush Had an Epiphany and Woke Up, He Could Be My Hero

This op-ed describes a fantasy-- one that would I think would be the BEST news the world could face in the next few years.

Just imagine if Bush and Cheney experienced epiphanies that turned them away from the dark side, and towards this idea of doing good. Imagine if Bush and Cheney, or even one of them, decided to do good, tell the truth, stand up to evil, in the forms of greed, hunger for power, corruption. I'm going to focus on Bush. He's more likely to change.

Bush could turn his legacy around. He could go down in history as a person who really did find God, not the despicable territory he attributed to his connection with God. Could it happen? The odds are very long, and just mentioning it will surely lead to some labeling me a hopeless optimist. Still, if you follow morphogenic field theory, "The Secret" etc., you have to put the idea out there for it to manifest itself. Not that I'm suggesting we take it as anything other than a thought field that could gain momentum. But what if a lot of people started talking about how good it would be if Bush dumped his current advisors and started listening to others in the center or the left? What if this became a conversation that made it on the mainstream media?

Why shouldn't Larry King and Tim Russert talk about the possibility that Bush would dump Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, and the other neocon advisors who have taken him to the low point that he is the most hated, despised human ever to live, that he is seen and will be seen by history as the worst president, one of the worst leaders the US and the world have ever seen.

Why not show Quakers and Unitarians, Buddhists and Muslims, Jews and Evangelicals praying that he will wake up and realize that he's been getting bad advice, following bad policy, that he'll throw the idolators, the people who have been the REAL sources of evil, out of the Whitehouse.

He is a man, perhaps a weak, sadly misled, misguided man. But he is a man, and perhaps the way to heal the nation, to save it and the planet from several more years of destruction, suffering and possibly irreparable damage is not to fight, legislatively, but rather to seek to reach a part of Bush that has not yet seen light or fire-- the part of his heart, the part of any person's heart that sees truth, that beats to the rhythm of justice, compassion and kindness, rather than to fear, anger and the need to control. Some call this part of the person the reptilian part-- the reptilian brain.

Whatever it is called, we need to wake that in George W. Bush. It won't take money or power or political gaming. It will take people talking from a place of love, from a place of hope and perhaps faith and grace. Maybe the first step will be to get Laura Bush's attention.

I've spent the last six years thinking of Bush as a despicable monster. I need to change that. His behaviors have certainly been despicable and monstrous, but now, I will begin to leave a place in my conception of Bush where he has the potential to become a good man. It will take all my spiritual strength to fight my inclination to see him as a... but I stop myself from going into detail.

We need a discussion about how Bush could wake up and use the power he has remaining as a lame duck president to do good in the world. We need to discuss who he should fire, who he should have prosecuted, who he should bring into his inner circle of advisors, what issues he should start reversing his positions on. And it should not just be seen as a political awakening.

Just imagine if Bush had such an epiphany and suddenly became a progressive-- that he brought in Dennis Kucinich, Bernis Sanders, Al Gore, Ralph Nader, Thom Hartmann, Robert Borosage, Katrina Van Den Heuvel, and other leading progressives? Hey. If I'm going to go off the deep end fantasizing, why not go all the way. Imagine that he listened to these people and started chastising the Dems for not being bold and progressive enough. Imagine he brought the most progressive Dems in to meet with him and encouraged them to draft legislation that would reverse the worst aspects of the Patriot Act, the Military Commissionas Act, and other toxic legislation Bush approved before. Imagine... I can imagine people on the right calling for his psychiatric hospitalization, and very possibly, people on the right looking for ways for him to have an "accident." Sure, it's crazy, but this world is crazy and people do wake up. Millions of Republicans have already woken up.

We need millions of people in churches, temples, mosques, synagogues to rise up and share the same prayers for Bush's awakening. This could happen. He is not oblivious. He doesn't read, but he knows what is happening. There are 25 million misguided evangelicals. There are far more people of faith who could pray for Bush's turnaround.

I'm not kidding myself. The odds are low. But if Bush actually did wake up and do a one eighty, he could become a hero, including me-- becoming MY hero. History could truly describe him as a man who found wisdom and truth and took his opportunity to make a huge difference in the world. Or he can continue down the dark path he has been guided to and and has chosen to follow, where surely, the Bush name will be spoken in the same breath as Attilla, Caligula, Hitler, Amin and Pol Pot.

Meanwhile, we must continue to push the Dems in congress to do a lot more than they've shown themselves to be willing to do, and we need to push the Republicans in congress who have already begun to wake up to get the idea that they must take serious steps to save America. It's all about waking up.