Giving our power away and taking it back – Bush and Obama as reflections November 12, 2008
Posted by bodhidude in : Society , trackbackWith the election of Barack Obama and a new person assuming the role of president its interesting to look back on the years of Bush and reflect on just what we have been dreaming up. I’ve become mostly interested in this contemplation from the perspective of personal power, to what degree have we been empowered or disempowered as co-creators of our society and larger reality?
In my view President Bush was the ultimate and most extreme representation of a society that had given its power away. Bush in so many of his qualities and actions personified this especially in his disregard for the opinions of anyone that disagreed with him and in his incredible abuses of power with very few consequences. I mean I don’t know if you remember Bush publicly admitting that he broke the law with the warrantless wiretapping decision basically saying – yeah I broke the law, so what, what are you going to do about it? That’s a powerful reflection of an incredible imbalance and just how blatant it became. With all the incompetence, abuses and callousness of the Bush administration many people clearly began to feel hopeless and feeling powerless to do anything to change the course we were on.
So maybe we hit bottom with Bush and from this bottom the Obama campaign was born. Obama’s campaign drew on a mass of grassroots power and enthusiasm like no campaign in the history of this country. The statement on Obama’s website whether you take it seriously or not is a reflection of that – “I’m asking you to believe, not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington, I’m asking you to believe in yours.” That statement is asking us to believe in our ability to bring real change. I think that speaks to the heart of the matter and the key in all of this. Do we believe that we have the power to bring about real change, both internally within our own lives and externally in the larger society?
I think it is important also to contemplate all of this in relationship with the deeper process of transformation that is happening now especially in these last few years before 2012. From my perspective we seem to have made a shift to dreaming up change on a large scale, a black president whose message centered on change and personal power. Wow! You may be skeptical and so am I in many ways but this also resonates for me and seems to fit into a larger pattern. It feels optimistic to me to think that whether we actually see real change manifested has far less to do with Barack Obama and his new administration and far more to do with us and what we choose to do with our power. Power that can never really be taken away by anyone, only temporarily forgotten about.
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