Father Larry

Dear Jeremy:

Today you e-mailed me to ask if I would volunteer to help organize for President Obama. I would probably have been able to say an enthusiastic yes had the President paused to think he might want my help before denigrating people such as myself as “self-righteous” folk futilely tilting at wind mills in order to feel good about themselves.

If that is the President’s assessment of me I can live with it. Certainly far worse things have been said about me. And, what he said is partially true – he just doesn’t get the depth or quite the way to or in which it is true. If he genuinely understood the passion of the liberal heart and mind, he would not have been able to say what he did.

It is not just that I am piqued by the President’s stupid and thoughtless comment, although I am indeed that, but that my hope is for a leader who will labor, whether win or lose in the short term, for what is right without “wimping out” – who will have the courage and the stamina to lose a battle, or an election, in what will undoubtedly be a very long struggle for a better, kinder, more equal and sustainable world. I suspect that this will require not one but wave after wave of such persons who are willing to be spent for a quality of change and justice “we can believe in.”

To now the President has simply not shown himself to be such a person. Today, during lunch after church, I told my daughter and her family about your e-mail. She asked me what I was going to do. I replied that I did not know, but that in the end I would probably unenthusiastically vote for President Obama as the lesser of evils. The grandkids wanted to know what the President had done that I felt that way. My daughter answered for me, “That is precisely the problem, he hasn’t really done anything – no substantial change in which we can believe.”

I probably should have added to her reply that while President Barak Obama and the Democrats are a sad and colossal disappointment, Republicans are absolutely frightening. Of course, it may be that we are so captive as a society to the Industrial/Military complex that there is no longer any political hope for us – that the best we can do, as individuals, is to speak out prophetically against the whole system as a way or preserving our own personal moral integrity – and sanity.

Regrettably I know of no way to reach you with this response, and so I will just post it on my little blog in hope that maybe sometime in the not too distant future some anomaly in cyber space will result in your finding it on your screen. If not perhaps you will hear some other small, but more powerful, voice in our rather large and noisy world.