..For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men..
W. Shakespeare, Julius Ceasar
In the Y2008, full of hope and love, I wrote an open letter above to then President -Elect Barak Obama. I can still sign under every word. And I daresay, that if he had listened then to my humble voice or to similar voices- we would have had now a prosperous, progressive USA and Trump would have been in the dumpster.
I think though that Obama, the man, would have listened to me but Obama, the President-would not. Power corrupts and it corrupts from the start, from the moment a basically honest person goes for an office. Power corrupts by taking away the honor. Honorable people very rarely are invited to run for power. But there could be a case, when a basically reasonable and honest individual does not know if his/her sense of honor is available. Clever flattery can pursue such an individual to overstate his/her sense of honesty and wrongly treat it as a sense of honor, while it is not the same. Such people are brought in for power rather frequently because they are not immune to corruption. Obama was an honest man with a very low understanding what honor was. He was 'weighed and found wanting' by the test of power.
Recently Obama gave a speech in Chicago. It was too late for the country and the trumpists did not even bother to engage their big dogs to bark; they unleashed the squeaky jackals. They also openly mocked him, addressing the tragic Syrian events as ' the ones that make Obama look stupid'. In fact, they are quite right: It was Obama, the Nobel Peace Price recipient-in - advance, who unleashed deadly escapades in Libya and Syria with the horrible consequences them and us are now facing there. Why did he accept that Price anyway? He never deserved it.
Power corrupts. In Y1813 Russian Emperor Alexander the First was presented by the 'people's petition' to grant him an additional title of BLESSED, after the defeat of Napoleon. The emperor declined, "When we are with God, God is with us". His sense of honor helped him. I think, Obama's did not.
If a reasonable future historian writes a bio of Obama, that author would notice a peculiar pattern: here was a basically good man desperately working on becoming worse. It was as if someone would enter the Oval Office in the morning with the instructions for the day on how to screw up every really good thing and promote the bad things under the cover of the ' utter necessity '. Could it be really so? It surely felt that way.
The cabinet people Obama chose were far from progressive or loyal to him. They were mostly the rich elitists or people no one cared about. Moreover, it became obvious fairly quickly that they also were not inclined to stand their grounds in support of the President's cause. But what was that cause? In all his political actions Obama followed the mantra ' One step forward, two steps backward'.
Power corrupts in different ways. One of them is an induced sense of helplessness. To induce it, powerful forces draw an invisible circle around a person and he/she cannot exercise any decision outside of the boundaries of that circle. Watching Obama's actions that circle fairly soon becomes visible to those who wants to see: he was not allowed to 'rule the whites'. He was confined to the role of a symbol: see, we have a black, good- looking President, eat your checkers, dear world. But it was made abundantly clear to him that whites were untouchable. Brown people abroad, of course, were not: have your fun with Syria and Libya, no problem. But the white congressman can call you a liar during the State of the Union Address and" you should eat it. Trump can go around with the dangerous slander about you and your family, and you" must let it go. Imagine Lyndon Johnson being called a liar to his face by anyone, really. Now just also imagine if Obama was a vindictive individual and would have vigorously gone after Trump for his slander, leaving no stone unturned? We might not have Trump on that escalator. But Obama was restricted by the circle. It was obvious that the circle was there; who drew it, I wonder?
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