“If given the opportunity to write a letter to the President — a letter in which illness and impending death served a larger agenda– what would I say to him?”

This question was answered by a wonderful man who is in a hospice with perhaps days to live. His friend Paul Loeb posted Robert Ellis Gordon’s thoughts on HuffPo.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-loeb/letter-to-obama-from-a-dy_b_224588.html

I sent an email response to Robert and he asked that I post my comment on the HuffPo thread which I did. If you were moved as I was by the words of a man who has no fear to speak his truth, I would encourage you to do the same.

Robert is urging Obama to level with the people on the dire economic emergency we face. He wants President Obama to make clear we are in serious peril and to do it through authentic hope. To speak “more deeply from the heart as well as the head. Above all, speak in the spirit of Judge Learned Hand: ‘The spirit of liberty is the spirit of not being too sure.’”

Can a president do that? When the Wall Streeters have cunningly taught all economic masters to not frighten them into deep downswings, can a president reassure the people that he’s not sure how or when he can get us out of this mess?

Barack who inspired so many with his book and life story, who entered politics to expand the reach and power of the underserved and oppressed through the political power game, soon learned to pragmatically speak and think so some legislation could get passed that accomplished something, but not enough.

Pragmatic, safe speak was not what inspired a nation and a world. We didn’t strive to believe, “Yes we can!”, so that real change would come from maintaining and enabling the same old pay to play game. We didn’t shout back, “Yes we can, sort of!” As Robert points out, Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia didn’t move us by the logic, it moved us by the passion and humanity and our longing for a more fair and just world.

When Barack’s wife Michelle speaks you immediately sense her genuineness and capacity for love of her fellow human beings. We aren’t listening to her words. We listen to her heart. Just as I am sure Barack has learned a great deal from Michelle, I wished he could capture that aura. Unfortunately, that aura only works when it is totally genuine. I believe Barack got into politics for the right reasons and has sacrificed a lot personally, as do all significant legislators, to help people who desperately need help from a genuine heart and not a political one. He needs to take the risk of showing us his heart and even anger as well as his logical thinking if he wants the majority of us to pull together.

What has changed for him and us is the number of desperate people. It is no longer those who we could immediately recognize as street people or the rural poor. It is now all of us no matter the material trappings we use to shield ourselves from the real world. Our world is dying regardless of what the global warming naysayers claim. Even if we dismiss global warming, we have too many people on a planet with dwindling resources contrasted by a medical ability to live far longer than ever realistically imagined.

In the future, who will make the decisions about who lives long and who doesn’t. Can you imaging an impartial jury deciding that or dog eat dog capitalistic survival deciding it? It is up to us now to begin the process of who will run our future world provided our grandkids have one that isn’t already lost.

We rightfully are placing enormous expectations on the mind and heart of our 44^th president. If anyone should be in that position, it should be Barack with his exceptional intelligence, communication skills and life experience. Now our task is to find the best way to support him.

While we need people to tell us the truth of the peril we face with our damaging capitalistic domination and imperialistic current approach, the warnings are meaningless if we throw up our hands and say the challenge is too tough to solve or even imagine solving.

We have to find our small, individual role using our personal strengths and pull together, not apart, if we want to give ourselves a chance. We have to do that for the remainder of our lives as Robert has done and marvelously been revealed to us by the posting on HuffPo.

As we start another year in our young American history, I hope you will think about your part, not that you haven’t, and renew your “Yes we can!’ spirit to do whatever you can, in your life journey.

I would feel so alone and discouraged on this journey if it were not for the Internet and all the wonderful friends locally and worldwide that I have discovered that share my passion to build a better world. We have been provided a marvelous tool to make our voices heard. That is why I know, “We can do it!”

Just when I thought that the hillbilly hate fest would either have to wind down or declare itself a farcical sitcom like “All in the Family,” along comes a GOP activist from South Carolina who actually made me waste some perfectly good booze and several pilfered Starbucks napkins wiping up the monitor, while gasping helplessly.

The story begins innocently enough; a gorilla escapes from the Riverbank Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, causing some local consternation.  Then, and I couldn’t make this up if I tried, SCGOP activist and perennial GOP candidate Rusty DePass (his real name) declared, before the media, that the escapee must be a relative of First Lady Michelle Obama.  Unable to immediately reach Jonah Goldberg or Rush Limbaugh by telephone for a revisionist history escape hatch, this proud Confederate-American “recovered” by saying that he meant only that the First Lady’s misguided belief in evolution led him to conclude that, she was in fact related to the errant ape.  He helpfully provided a made-up quote to bolster this odd thesis, which was instantly debunked.  Whew, that was close.  What might have been rightly thought both racist and idiotic therefore became both a sop to the anti-evolution right and a “dark” hint at yet another liberal conspiracy.

Those righties can certainly think on their feet.

The first manifestation that I witnessed of this nifty trick in action was during the debate here in the early 90′s about how old-growth logging, a profitable venture that had succeeded by that time in driving the spotted owl to the brink of extinction, was threatened not by the fact that all the trees were gone, which they were, but by a bunch of hippies who liked owls.  To the timber town rednecks, who’d spent a generation voting down school levies since book-learning was unnecessary for pulling green chain at the mill, it wasn’t the rapacious short-sightedness of the timber companies nor the exporting of raw lumber to Asia that was causing the mills to close down, but rather some danged googly-eyed bird only liberals cared about.  Even then, the disappearance of old growth had already forced the mills to retool for smaller, second growth trees, being industrially mowed down from the ceaseless monocultural tree farms that already stretched from Tillamook to Bandon.  But somehow, it was only the few thousand acres of the absentmindedly left standing ancient forest, the final habitat for what few owls remained, that mattered.  Thus, when the Dixie Chicks were still in high school, folks out here were throwing “Spotted Owl Barbeques,” trying proudly and defiantly to kill the last owls before some pointy-headed liberals took the chainsaws away.

Dwindling salmon runs, resulting from subsidized hydropower and agriculture and the conversion of the Columbia and Snake rivers into slackwater barge canals created another well-funded pro-extinction movement amongst developers, farmers, and industries that were riding the gravy train of habitat destruction, while the fish were being trucked on the freeway to the sea, since the rivers were no longer available for such an antiquated purpose.  Suddenly, the Bush administration declared that the sanctity of Lewiston, Idaho’s 30-year old “seaport” was inviolable as holy writ, and Karl Rove even finagled a water diversion to farmers from the Klamath River in time for the 2004 election, which killed 60,000 salmon, but got Bush a lot of face-saving votes in the tumbleweed territory of a state he lost anyway.  And the righties cheered.  Fuck, yeah.

Right about the time Michelle Obama was opening a sternly-worded letter from The Mid America CropLife Association that took her to task for doing something so radically unsound as to grow vegetables organically, when everyone knows that dousing one’s arugula with the latest incarnations of DDT and Napalm was the American Way, the Redstaters and their tooth deprived half-brothers in trailer parks across America were crowing about how much energy they were going to waste for Earth Hour Saturday night.

In the creepy, unfunny game of small-dicked one-upsmanship to which all righty diatribes inevitably descend, the usual suspects all howled and crowed about how they were going to fire up their cars, boats, blowtorches, and meth cookers to full blast just to show those Gore-sodden commies a thing or two about America.  Most, if not all, pointed out the fortuitous coincidence that their War on Christmas lights were still up, and need only be plugged in.  Nyeah, nyeah, nyeah, that’s really showin’ em.  And when the bills come, they’ll be striking another blow for Free Enterprise.

Their grandchildren will surely thank them.