Let's not "go all Kumbaya" on Obama

"Let's vote for Obama, ...but let's not go all Kumbaya either," former California senator Tom Hayden said recently when asked about the upcoming national election. Kumbaya (also Kum Ba Yah), probably comes from Gullah, "a Creole dialect spoken by the former slaves living on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia." (Wikipedia). If you study the lyrics of the song, you'd clearly have to be an unempathic human being not to respond to them with compassion: "Hear me crying lord, hear me singing, hear me praying..." Many folk artists have recorded the lyrics over the years. Perhaps too many. The song has become a kind of anthem sung by progressive thinking people hopeful of change. Not bad. But, like most art, even the exalted kind, if over-used, or used in any-and-all contexts, it may fall into mere banality, or worse, become the subject of parody. Of late, "Kumbaya" has been used to describe a political naïef, an ingenuous (innocent, trusting) person operating with good will, but lame with "real world" instincts because he or she tends to think in a "childlike" way about "grownup" things.

Thus, Senator Hayden warned those who might be placing too much burden on Senator Barack Obama not to be naive (adjective), that is, one who lacks worldly wisdom, one who is unsuspecting, gullible; childish, innocent, simple, unsophisticated." (Concise Oxford Dictionary).

I, myself, will vote for Ralph Nader unless Barack Obama is in trouble in California. If there's a large turnout Obama should get it. But, and here we go, lest folks "go all kumbaya" concerning Obama and his famous by-word "change," he is at best a center-left, moderate with at least passing ties to the Chicago School of Economics, Milton Friedman, et. al., (not academic friends of working class folks), we still need to get him in. Obama is at least holding an oxygen tank for us to breathe easier, whereas Bush used his to explode over Baghdad, "shock doctrine" man that he is.

Assumptions about an economic meltdown are warranted, yet what's kept the criminal class on Wall Street and on the Beltway going is the deep wealth of the nation's resources, i.e. its people, (certainly including the current immigrant slave class), its ingenuity (we are different from other nations in this respect), and, of course. the natural resources not yet squandered. We'll come back from this latest (Iraq debacle, housing melt-down, current oil bubble), but the rank-and-file (we) will pay the bill, as always. Look at the Bear Stearns bailout, look at the cash infusions for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It was Bush, et. al. who deregulated, let them and their social class pay the bill. Not likely. The "folks" are asleep. If we are to carry on in the fashion of the past half century since WW2, giving our lives over to speculative profit, imperial war mongering, sound bite politics, and greater numbers of "the distracted" playing video games, all trance-like and spell-bound, it would still take another century to bankrupt the nation IMHO. If they succeed in continuing to rob the Social Security Fund, it would push this meltdown date forward. Read "Citizens," a history of the French Revolution by Simon Schama. Citizens do take control, once-in-a-while, but you'd rather not have it like the French Revolution, which spilled blood on everyone. You'd rather have the "folks" participate in the still-existent, workable political structure. Do you see any evidence of this apart from the heady kids in Seattle and Genoa. I don't. More of the same, even if a bit less shady.

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