Our New Anahuac

I was in Corpitos (Corpus Christi, Tejas) this weekend. More than one of my family members asked me in passing what I thought about Obama. While few political questions can be answered in a simple way, I try to sum up what I can in these social over-a-beer type situations. The quickest thing that I could sum up was that I don’t believe that he will be able to deliver everything that he says, and that is basically what I believe. However, on a deeper level, I just simply believe that the system is set up so that we may not be able to truly reach our full potential, or even half of our potential under this system. It has nothing to do with him.

Many people think that this is an overly simplistic and conspiratorial mindset, maybe even naive, but the truth is that if one studies the statistics, I think it is the people that maintain hope in this system that are naive. The so-called Hispanic drop out rate in 1972 was almost three times the white drop out rate. In 2006 our drop out rate was OVER three times that of whites. Furthermore, our incarceration rate is one in six of our young men. One in six! Much worse than before. Where is our progress?

Last Tuesday (Nov. 25), on Earth 101 (http://archive.kpft.org/), Hitaji Aziz reflected the first potential danger that Mr. Obama poses-minorities of strong opinion and great ideological authority, ridiculing any critique of Obama, and elevating him to an almost godlike figure. “He is not just one person. He is like the mirror reflection of the bits and pieces of his collective society. If we look at him, we are looking at oursleves. If we attack him, we are attacking ourselves.” This is what she said. She went on to criticize anyone that declined to place our hope and claimed that many of us are “addicted to suffering.”

So this is the first danger, substituting true gains for a blind hope. There is no reason to stop a healthy criticism of the government and the man who sits at its head, yet this massively effective Obama marketing campaign has been able to co-opt great local thinkers and national thinkers like Cornel West. Beyond co-opting them, we are at danger of having them point their bullhorn at us for being critical, and pointing out that the statistics bear out that we have made no real progresssince the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

The other danger is a danger for the right-wing reactionaries. It is not Obama that is dangerous to them, it is the hope that he has sold the people. As I have argued for many years, hope is the most revolutionary of emotions. When this hope becomes frustrated, they will have a volatile society on their hands. The other thing I told my family was that there was going to be a bunch of real pissed off people in about eight years.

And just in case you haven’t noticed, immigration is on the back backburner for this administration.