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And now we shred him.
Another way in which Barak Obama is the American Jesus: he is our sacrifice. He is going to pay dearly for all of our sins. He is a young man with an old soul; serious, but the champion of hope; brillant but not yet wise. Here is what wisdom looks like -- Lincoln at the beginning of his presidency, and at the end:
Hard times. Impossible choices. Law versus justice. War. Miserable mothers wrote letters, lamenting their dead sons lost in battle. The righteous path, ending slavery, required dismantling the economic foundation of half of our nation. A lawyer who suspended habeas corpus and tried civilians in military court. A father who lost his son. A husband whose wife drifted away from her sanity. And all the while, the sins of our people poisoned him from the inside. Our nation hemmoraged, blood saturated the landscape. We pleaded with him, our best surgeon, just to cut off the mangled limb and let us be free of this terrible pain. He risked our life to save us, and we shot him in the head.
Barak Obama. What a kind face. His family. Those sweet little girls, that smart pretty wife. These hard times will eat them, I fear. Unfathomable secrets have already been told to him, he's dragging the weight of them. The decisions he will make are ones no one should have to live with. The entire world, every breathing soul, will fail or prosper due to his judgment.
I know he can do it. I chose him to do it. He knows he can and therefore must.
But the price hurts my heart.
The deepest gift of this surrender -- he already knows what it will cost.
1 comment:
Good post -- I've been thinking about this a lot. If you look back at local and especially school politics, you'll see a lot of black people posted to positions at the helms of ships already wrecked or poised for wreckage. Posted, one could say, as ready-made sacrificial lambs, so that when these schools/towns/economies/now country go under, they can blame the newly elected (or hired, or appointed, or whatever), as if it were their fault.
I want to believe that the new America will be smarter and kinder than this and that Obama will in fact rise and overcome the massive problems that we face. I want to believe that the new Democratic congress will let him make the changes we need. I mostly hope that he is what we want him to be, brave enough, strong enough and righteous enough to make the tough decisions and lead the way for a new American life.
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