No Such Thing As False Hope

Just look at that crowd…  — Photo by roxannejomitchell’s photos, Creative Commons.I spent much of yesterday writing a carefully researched and documented essay comparing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, with the aim of demonstrating why the former was a better choice for President than the latter. As it sat this evening in not-quite-done mode on my laptop, my ten-year-old son crawled into my lap and asked me what I was working on. We talked a little about current politics, and the Presidential primaries, and somehow in the conversation it was mentioned that Senator Clinton had urged the citizens of this nation not to indulge in false hopes by voting for such an “inexperienced” candidate as Senator Obama. To which my son replied

There are no false hopes. We need all the hope we can get. We have been living in a cultural dark ages, and it’s time we crawled out of it.

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Visionary Terms

The race for the 2008 Presidential election is off on a premature start, and the results are already being polled by the most respected polling firms. The promises are being rolled out by the truckload, the platforms are being polished and set up for viewing with the utmost fanfare and hooplah. None of this really makes any difference in the long term view, however. We all know that promises will be broken and platforms forgotten with the Inaugural Address.

The United States of America has been hurtling down a damaging track for the last twenty years at least, and in the last decade we decided to throw out the handbrake and barrel full tilt into the horizon with blind faith as to our eventual destination. How did this happen?
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