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People are angry with President Obama for sending more troops to Afghanistan. They're angry with him for his stimulus package, the proposed budget and the bank bailout. They say he's spreading himself too thin. They say they're tired of seeing his face all over the media.
These are some of the very same people, however, that complained that George W. Bush shunned the media and dissed the American People. These are some of the very same people that said too much deregulation and too many displaced tax cuts are responsible for much of what got us into the current crisis we're in. These are also some of the very same people that have no other solution but are quite content to snipe and complain.
It would appear that no matter what is done by this man, it will never be good enough.
To a certain extent it's understandable. For years many of us, most of us, have been frustrated at seeing what the republicans have done. We've been railing against the GOP machine and their tunnel vision only to be called unpatriotic and much worse. For the better part of a decade we've been marginalized and berated and humiliated. We've also been ripped off and had our life savings wiped out, our jobs taken away from us and our lives torn apart.
So of course now that we have someone in The White House who ran on a platform of change, who for two years spoke to our hearts and souls and said he will make things better, we want those better times to come ASAP. We need them to have happened yesterday, last week, last month, last year.
And yes, it is also understandable that we can't just settle for the "it took us years to get into this mess, it's going to take a long time to get us out" argument. We don't have a long time to wait. We can no longer afford to sit idly by and let politicians play with our lives.
That shouldn't mean that because we crawled into a corner back when Bush first stole the 2000 election and the GOP began their reign of fear we should now make President Obama pay for that mistake. Yes we, the American People, need to stay vigilant and we need to speak out when we see things are going wrong. We also need to give the man a chance.
We need to understand that while change was promised it was never said it would be overnight. We need to understand that while in a perfect world our brave men and women sacrificing their lives for us would and should be home right now, there are those that want nothing but to see what happened on 9/11 happen again and magnified by a factor of a hundred or more. The Taliban are on the rise again and though it can be argued that our actions exacerbated this, we can't simply do nothing.
We cannot turn our backs over there now. Better or worse we're in it and to pull out now would leave an even greater mess than what was there to begin with. Instead of trying to equate his actions with those of JFK and Viet Nam maybe it would be better if we look forward instead of trying to turn back the clock.
We also cannot keep on saying it was Bush's fault. There is enough blame in this on both sides of the aisle and whether we like it or not, care to admit it or not, we're all in this together.
This economic crisis is a national one which many have likened to war. In times of crisis and especially in times of war we owe it to ourselves and to the man we elected to give him the support he needs and the chance he deserves to make things right.
