[this is from the forthcoming issue of my magazine...will be sending this letter this week]
Letter to United States Senator Barack Obama (Democrat, Illinois)
June 22, 2008
12:03 a.m.
Coffeetime Coffeehouseâ€"
my armchair
Portland, Oregon
Dear Senator Obama,
I am writing to you tonight in the full & hopeful expectation that come about seven
months from now, you will be sworn in as the next President of the United States. You’ll
take the vow to defend the Constitution, be nodded toward by a group of important faces,
& a cheer will ring the globe. You will be a kind of new bride not just to this nation, but
also to the six billion souls around the world your words & actions will affect from that
winter’s day on.
The nightmare of George W. Bush in elected office will be over. He & his criminal
brothers will be pushed off the world stage. Perhaps to continue their treacherous pursuits
further in the shadows. But you, sir, will be the man chosen by a nation to bring its highest
office back into common light.
Let me say several things as preamble here. First, I would have rathered that Al Gore
take his rightful office at last next January. It was his to take, in my view, not yours or
Senator Clinton’s or Senator Edwards. Certainly not John McCain’s. He chose to defer;
millions sighed, & respected this choice.
Second, much of what I think & feel toward you involves your own word: hope. As a
Senator, you did not stick out so very much. None of the Democrats have this decade.
There is something of the coward in you each & all, that you saw the nightmare of George
Bush & Dick Cheney & did not act beyond smoothly worded protests to bring them down.
The wounds of this country & the world lay at your feet, & afresh each time soldiers die in
Iraq, each time the American economy is raped new by the corporate elite. Each time the
corporate media whores reduce the complexities of human lives to an embarrassing photo or
an intense argument about principles of law & morality few if any of them understand, much
less care for when the day’s headline moves on.
Hope. You came into our lives using that word. Hope. It is a word for wishes, for
suffering, spoken by the vulnerable, the desperate. You said it over & over until many of us
became willing to keep listening. To allow hope again.
We didn’t lose it when the World Trade Towers fell on 9/11/2001. However it came
that they fell. No, we began to lose hope more when we saw Bush obliterate Iraq for no
reason, & nobody stopped him. Not the United Nations. Not the Constitutional separation
of powers that says that Congress shall declare wars.
We lost more hope when Bush stole another election in 2004 & nobody blinked.
We lost more as the death toll in Iraq climbed into the many thousands & was forbidden to
be seen even on our televisions.
We lost hope when we were told we could be locked up forever, when we were told
we were being spied on, when our costs for bread & gasoline skyrocketed while the few
made billions.
So, Senator, you said hope & we salivated, our souls sweated for it. Hope, like faith
its close kin, raises even when there is no logic to it.
This draws me near to my point. I don’t expect you to cure every ill or solve every
woe. Men will still hate for reasons of skin, ethnicity, sex, countless other even more
ridiculous reasons.
Children will still cry, adults will still get lonely & drink til the pain numbs. The
elite of this world will still find ways to suck the planet’s varied & plentiful tit like it was
theirs more than others’ by divine right.
No, you are one man, with finite powers of office & intellect. And a big, big shitheap
to go at. Eight years of George W. Bush’s smiling okie-dokey pard’ners as he squats upon
every creature in this world & lets his private shit-storm of demons fly in every direction.
Walk off hitching up his drawers & saying “y’all remember what all I done for you.â€
Senator, Mr. Obama, Barack: it’s simple. Don’t fuck it up. We will get you into
office, by the millions will we get you there. Right now there’s no real fight left in Bush’s
remains. Oh, like Jack Nicholson says in Easy Rider, “they’ll talk to you & talk to you &
talk to you†but they are re-trenching. Even a gang of rapists will take a break for a piss & a
cold brew.
We’ll get you to next January when you will take that oath on that bright winter’s
day. Then we’ll do more than watch: We’ll keep doing what’s getting you to that day,
what’s pushing opposition from your path.
See, being our hero right now is hard work but I think it’s kind of easy too. Lots of
pretty speeches, lots of perty promises. No, sir, wait until you are our President, the one we
blog & shout & phonebank & argue & canvass & donate for. Just wait.
You *will* end the War in Iraq. You *will* stop the spying on American citizens. You
*will* get us out of the prison cage of petrocrats. You *will* help the poor & the sick & the
vulnerable of this nation, & you *will* rejoin this nation to the world of nations. You *will*
become the world’s number one advocate for peace among all men & women, & healing
with our mother planet.
If you do not. If you deal from the bottom with the corporate jackal whores
consuming all blindly these many years, if you go soft on defending the defenseless, if you
turn to bullets & platitudes as though salvation, we will drive you, sir, from office to a place
in Hell that will look far up toward George W. Bush’s.
That’s what it’s like to have raised our hopes, to hold them, to ask we work our days
toward that January day & your vow to defend the Constitution. That’s what is going on,
the spirits raised up & roiling right now.
I will vote for you. I will work for your campaign after my own ways. I will cheer
when you take office. But I will be with millions watching thereafter, & still ready for
whatever comes next.
Sincerely,
RS
Portland, Oregon