Paradigm Shift: The Obama Presidency

By Marc D. Goldfinger

“It is not by chance there are many of us.

It is not by chance we sing to each other.

It is not by chance the Gods let us touch.

It is not by chance, like plug and socket, we fit together.”—from A Room of Bone — a poem in Relationships by Marc D. Goldfinger; Ibbetson St. Press, Somerville, MA

George W. Bush has left the stage of the world.  It is Barack Obama’s time.  Yet as Barack Obama knows well, it is not only his time, but it is also our time.  Obama is our president and we are the people.  In his speech many of his reflections called upon us to do our part, for he knows that alone and isolated, a president who works against the will of the people cannot work.  We have just witnessed eight years of decline, eight years of waning hope, eight years of spending the birthright of our future, eight years of hopelessness, death without purpose, eight years of the heart of a nation breaking into tears of sorrow.

The glory of Barack Obama is that he is truly the heart of the United States, yet he realizes the heart is only a source of inspiration if all the other organs work well.  Barack Obama knows that a leader is only as strong as his ideals; that if he doesn’t lead well, the people will not follow.

Barack Obama does not take his new trust lightly.  He knows that the world is at a pivotal point as far as the human species is concerned.  He is aware that the path we take from this point is crucial, and it takes us all to task.  It is our responsibility to work with our new president, to help him achieve his goals and also to speak out to him when we feel that he is going off the path.  Because Barack Obama is a president who knows that he has much to learn from those around him.  Obama is a president who is humble, who will keep his ears to the ground, his eyes to the sky, his hands on the plow, and he knows that he must not only say what is necessary — he must follow through with his actions.

Sixty years ago, men and women of colour were relegated to the back of the bus; men and women of colour could not drink at the same water fountains as white people; men and women of colour were not free in the United States.

Barack Obama knows that, in just sixty years, there has been a paradigm shift in our country.  That is what makes it great.  It is not that everyone has changed in sixty years, but enough of us have changed to make this new world possible.

Barack Obama raises the hopes of the people of the United States.  But it is not only the people of the United States who have their eyes on this man with “The Audacity of Hope”, it is the people of the world who have their eyes on him because he raises their hopes too.  The world is watching him; the world is watching us; the world is waiting and hoping that Obama is what he says he is, and what he has shown us he is to become the president of our land.

I am a cynical man, but I have hope for humanity.  It has been a long time since I have been inspired by a leader, and Barack Obama has won my heart.  And not only my heart, but the hearts of many, people in the United States and people all over the world.

There was a time, a long while ago, when humanity was given hope.  There was a president who said, after Russia launched Sputnick, the first satellite, that we would be the first nation to reach the moon.  And God knows, if there is a God and I believe there is one, that we joined together, each in our own way, and in 1969 humanity walked on the moon.

Barack Obama offers us a new challenge.  He does not say that we will be the first to walk the moon; Obama says that we will lead the world with fierce love; that we will “offer our hand if you will unclench your fist.”  Obama says that “this is the time to put aside childish things.”.  I believe he knows that war is the enemy of us all, and those who choose war over life are the ones who delay the new rebirth of the Human Nation.

It is not just the United States that must grow; it is all the nations of the world who must unclench their fists, just as we must join them.  Those of us here in the United States with clenched fists must stop, think and open their hands so they can work with us.  Barack Obama knows that this is a world where, if anyone is left behind, whether black, yellow, white, poor, rich, red or just average, if anyone is left behind, we will all be left behind.

This is not a time where we must fight and claw to be the first to walk the surface of the moon.  This is a time when we must join hands and work together to walk and ride and sail across a clean, peaceful Earth.  There is only one way to do this.

Again, I repeat Obama’s words, which he took from the Bible, and those words are that “we must put aside childish things.”  This I know to be true — war is one of those childish things we must put aside.  As Obama said, “When it was time for us to face the future, we faced it and did not falter.”

Barack Obama is more than the heart of a nation.  He can be the heart of the world.  Instead of strapping bombs to ourselves and destroying the future, we must strap tool belts around our waists, whatever tools we use to build, and work to turn our backs on the errors of the past.

There was a president who took us to the moon.  Let Barack Obama be the president who takes us all home, and let him be the president that inspires us to work so that all people, all over the world, can be safe in a home of their own and walk the world in peace.

Published in Spare Change News, Jan. 29 — Feb. 11th, 2009.

Obama, The New President

Now the work begins, undoing all the damage that the Bush presidency has done.  Hopefully, all the soldiers will be brought home from Iraq.

The fact is, this is more than Barack Obamas job to remake the vision of our country.  It is our job too.

Under the regime of Bush & Cheney, we have again become The Ugly American.  Barack Obama inspires hope in me and I know that I have to do my part.

Use less fuel.  I bicycle, I have a small motorcycle that gets 60 mpg, a Honda Rebel 250cc, and a nine year old Honda Civic that gets close to 30 mpg.  My wife has a newer Honda Civic which gets 35 mpg.

And that’s just the beginning.  A new beginning for all of us.

Do I pray?  Yes, I do.  But it takes more than that.  My actions speak louder than my words.  I can say anything I want here but if I don’t live it, it becomes meaningless blather.

May the world, and the United States, heal, heal, heal.

Our species stands poised on the edge.  We face challenges never faced before.  The choice is ours — the collapse of civilization as we know it — or a world where life is held sacred and promises kept.

May whatever God you believe in calm your spirit and enrich your soul.

What To Do Next After The Crash

Turn off your TV!  Sit back.  Take a few deep breaths.  Relax.  Getting frightened doesn’t change anything.   Look around you.  Is everything okay where you live.

If it isn’t, then you have to deal with it.  If everything in your humble abode is okay, then be there.

This too shall pass.  Forget the media.  For them, this is payday.

I’m going to vote.  I’m going to follow what I believe.  You can do the same.  Follow the path to the truth.  I’m not going to tell you what that path is.  Inside yourself, you know it.

Pay attention.

Pre-Election Blues — Looking Back

Written by Marc D. Goldfinger on Dec. 28, 2000, published by Spare Change News in April, 2001.

“If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier — just so long as I’m the dictator,” —George Walker Bush said, sending ripples of laughter through the room.—–a joke from the lips of our soon to be President of the United States, December 18, 2000.

Colour this by numbers. George W. Jr. was the director of Harken Energy of Dallas, Texas and a major stockholder of that corporation. Can it be that he knew nothing when he dumped $848,560 worth of its stock only one week prior to a poor earnings report that sent it’s stock tumbling? Is insider trading okay?

Okay, let’s move to the present. There was a telephone call placed from Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris’s cell phone to Boy George W.’s mansion at 11:50pm election night. Harris said she never made the call, that Al Cardenas, chairman of the state Republican Party, borrowed the phone and made the call.

The other story told was that Dan Bartlett said the Florida Secretary of State’s website went down and old Jeb(Bush), who was in Austin on November 7th, called Harris. Then Katherine returned the call.

There are a lot of stories. There are stories about Black voters not being able to vote. Then there are the “chad” stories. Then there are the Republicans storming the (vote)counting houses in Broward County(Florida) stories.

Here’s an interesting story I pulled off the internet.

“A Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study the U.S. election event closely because it shows that election fraud is not only a third world phenomena. To illustrate the point, he made the following comments:

“Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former Prime Minister and that former Prime Minister was himself the former head of that nation’s secret police/intelligence agency.

“Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover from the nation’s pre-democracy past (the Electoral College).

“Imagine that the self-declared winner’s ‘victory’ turned on disputed votes cast in a Province governed by his brother!

“Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner’s opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.

“Imagine that members of that nation’s most despised caste, fearing for their livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner’s candidacy. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner’s brother.

“Imagine that six thousand people voted in the disputed Province and that the self-declared winner’s lead was only 327 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines’ margin of error.

“Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed Province or in its most hotly disputed district.

“Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a Governor of a major Province, had the worst human rights record of any Province in his nation and his Province actually led the nation in executions.

“Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.

“None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner’s will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of a third world country.”

Now imagine that the President-Select was voted in by a majority of 5 from the high court of 9, the Chief Justice (Rehnquist) being a man who owned two homes, one in Phoenix and one in Vermont, that existed in developments that prohibited, by contract, selling to Blacks and Jews, by another Justice (Scalia) who called affirmative action “the most evil fruit of a fundamentally bad seed”, and, last but certainly not least, a justice (Thomas) who was selected for the high court by the President-Select’s father.

Who said that it couldn’t happen here.