Psychedelic Sofa

It has been nearly a week since the election that brought America her first non-white president. It was a long time coming and it was historic. That night celebration was definitely in order.

But too quickly the honeymoon is over and barely more than two months before Obama actually takes office a lot of work needs to be done. If he does not start ramping up for his presidency now, he will start already behind. In some respects he will be anyway. Barack Obama will walk into the executive office of a country gutted by eight years of Friedman economic rot from the inside. Many of our once strong civic core infrastructures are wholly reliant on private industry to function. The wolves have already raided the henhouse, but the farmhouse too. We have an illegal war that has bled and broken our military and treasury to the tune of over $550 Billion. The last straw was the funneling of over $800 Billion dollars that our treasury really did not have to give to banks and industry that has been basically raping the middle class a reward for dismal failure to the public they were suppose to serve.

Obama is indeed starting in the hole. And he will be tested. Not just by foreign interests that would do us harm, but by an economy laid waste by unbridled capitalism. Taxing the rich may set things right, but it may just backfire and bring nothing but criticism. The powers that really control the nation, if not the world, would love nothing more than for the first president of African decent to fail miserably. How can we civilly reclaim from the uber-wealthy that once belonged to the public? With our nation producing nothing other than weapons, where does our industry go to grow? Does it finally consume itself? And what happens next?

I hope to hell that we can overcome this period in history without befalling the fate of other nations that have reached the heights of power the United States has. We have had hard times before, but some of the challenges that face us today simply did not exist in the past. It took lots of money and public support to get Obama elected. We will need to both support him and keep his feet to the fire for him to fulfill the promise of hope described during his campaign.

We will also need to marginalize those who have fully deserved it during the past eight years as we have been marginalized. The often obnoxious, yet entertaining, Keith Olbermann handled his Worst Persons piece best last Wednesday. Each familiar neo-conservative face, a "leader" and two water carriers, were rendered irrelevant. Indeed, who really gave a fuck what they had to say after being so wrong about everything -- everything except how to swindle unimaginable funds from the public trust.