No wonder our race-sensitive adversaries have been able to use him like a heavy punching bag. He has been on the ropes in his "rope-a-dope for hope" posture for almost four years. Now that it is election time again, he is back out in the center of the ring bouncing on his toes like Rush Limbaugh. But by now he must know that we know the real deal and the real Obama: "Obama's hope" is like Sarah Palin's "bridge to nowhere:" It does not include an action plan, unless it is what we have seen for the last four years of pre-emptively rolling over and genuflecting in the face of the power of our Republican, corporate and warmongering adversaries.
And then Mr. Obama's hope is that we will patiently wait for the next election cycle where, empty-handed, he again will come center stage and puff up his chest and crow progressive themes like a Banny rooster, and then expect us to line up and vote lockstep for him again? He does this all the while he is sending millions of robo-calls seeking more campaign donations with the same old lame and false messages about how liberal and progressive he is, and about how the "Republican bogey man" will get us unless we again send money to his campaign and vote for him again?
Somehow, I feel that the polls that show blacks still supporting him by 90% are wrong, you can fool blacks one time, but not two times in a row. Many of us, especially those outside the Oprah sphere, will be sending a message to him this time around. We will be doing so if for no other reason than that as far as black issue are concerned -- the cities, unemployment, etc., Mitt Romney and Obama are soul mates: They both are political chameleons and moral pygmies who will tell everyone but black people exactly what they want to hear. The only difference is that they are equally cheap politicians carrying ideological flags of opposite colors, red and blue. I have been tempted to send Mitt Romney some talking points that say: All you have to do to split-off a large percentage of the black from Mr. Obama and send him into an allergy attack, is to mention doing something for the inner cities. Only Newt Gingrich was smart enough to do so, and his chances at this stage seem nil.
Remember the old joke about the two buzzards sitting high out on a limb waiting for something to die. Impatient, one buzzard says to the other: "To hell with waiting, I am going to go down there and kill something." That my friend, is the difference between a black Christian and a black existentialist, between Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Jeremiah Wright, between Harry Belafonte and Condoleezza Rice. One will sit out on a limb forever waiting for his rewards in the next dimension. This life to him is only a rehearsal for the next world, the "real life." Christian hope and Obama's audacious hope, is enough for this life. To the others, like Mr. Belafonte, Dr. West, and the two ministers he interviewed here, they will try to take their lives into their own hands and try to fashion something out of them. To hell with waiting on Obama's audacity of hope. Again, Mr. Belafonte is right on target on this point: when he says that groups must take responsibility for themselves. Politicians no matter their skin color, or "verbal only" ideology, will sell us all down the drain.
There is a little Barack Obama and a little Jeremiah Wright in each of us black people. We have waited, sung, mourned, cried, marched and prayed "too long" and our cause is "too just" to watch Mr. Obama act as if he is allergic to black people? It is time to stop turning the other cheek, and start turning all this empty hope into an action program. Despite the cost, people like Mr. Obama must be pushed out of the way so we can get own with a more progressive action program, one that at least in principle can compete with the race-sensitive Republicans on an equal footing. Obama's pre-emptive compromise is an action plan that helps the only helps the other side.
And maybe, just maybe, Mr. Obama has miscalculated. With a Republican Congress, why should blacks vote for four more years of Obama's promises, when we already know that it will only be more Washington gridlock? Even the crumbs from the Republican table, (with both a Republican President and a Republican Congress) can't be any worse than "hoping" for Obama to acknowledge the reality of our 95% voting bloc?
In this book we see that Mr. Belafonte, like Dr. West did not use his life way out on a limb "hoping for something to happen." He did not wait for a Messiah; he flew down to Selma, Alabama with a hundred thousand dollars of his own money in his briefcase to help Dr. King survive during one of King's most trying times. This was a profoundly existentialist's act. Unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Belafonte audaciously put his hope and his money where his mouth was; and then he executes in unapologetically and with perfection. He did not ask the Republicans for their consent.
We cannot continue to assert, insinuate or "hope" our way into the hearts of the racists who oppose our every move. While we diddle with Obama's hope, they are on a fast track in the "active rollback mode," and are succeeding at it -- using every lever of power and action to their advantage. Right before our eyes, the whole Republican Party has morphed into a "legitimized racist anti-black, anti-minority Party" literally a "white Citizens Council, writ large" circa 2012, all out in the open and all under the convenient rubric of "being conservative." What they have, my friend is a definite "action program:" not Barack Obama's gauzy non-plan of audacious hope?
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