[1]The explosion we all heard on Monday, the 8th of August, 2011 has now been identified. It has been determined that the explosion was actually detonated somewhere in the vicinity of Washington, DC, and was apparently loud enough to be heard in all corners of the planet. It was originally thought that Earth had been struck by a large piece of space debris. That theory, however, has now been completely and scientifically discredited. It now appears the explosion was of a more transcendental nature.
We learned from the Manhattan Project the enormity of the power released when the particles of an atom are forced into a state of separation. The devastation of that chain reaction, as we all know, permanently altered the course of the world. We learned on Monday what happens when Hope and Change are pressed into that same fission process. Monday was the day that the Hope and Change bomb exploded. It was the day that Hope and Change were irreparably separated from Reality.
You could hear the drone of the Enola Gay approaching for several weeks. It was a-coming. We just didn’t know when it would detonate. It now has…on Monday, August 8th, 2011.
It just so happens that the explosion occurred on the same day the world’s major market indexes dropped by five percent. But that loss of a few trillion dollars in investor assets was not the explosion we all heard. It also happens that the explosion was heard within a few miles of Maureen Dowd, the infamous uber-liberal editorial columnist for the New York Times, who seems to now believe her beloved President may be the worst leader the country has ever had. But that too was just a little fire burning in the distance, and not the source of the explosion. It might also be postulated that the explosion was linked to the leaders of other major nations referring to the United States as economic parasites or threatening to “collect on any losses†incurred on two trillion dollars of US Treasury holdings. But, lo, neither of these was of a potency to be heard from even a few thousand miles away. They were just the resultant detritus of the real explosion, now strewn about the planet.
The sound we heard Monday was rather the sound that occurs when something really big and important blows up. What we all heard earlier in the week was the exploding of another “I am going to create a perfect world†ideal. It was the explosion of pitiable arrogance.
Until Monday, vestiges of Hope and Change remained within the collective American – and world – psyche. Liberals still believed that Hope and Change lingered as a viable notion. Even conservatives clung to a miniscule hope that Hope and Change would not eventually kill us. And then, unfortunately, and as history will record, August 8th, 2011 happened. And we all felt it happen.
Periodically, a leader with a too-good-to-true ideal will step forward and we actually fall for them. We believe them not because we believe what they are saying is actually true, but rather because we simply want what they are saying to be true. Once, every so often, we decide to do a Barney Frank and “roll the dice.†Some days we just feel lucky.
The unfortunate end to this type of chapter in history is that when the ideal goes “poof,†the intensity of human emotion spikes to near unthinkable levels. The combination of remorse, anger, self-identified stupidity, arrogant vindictiveness and hopeless disbelief are unleashed amuck. The amount of hate in the social system is then systematically programmed to reach truly toxic levels. And the putrid emotion comes from all corners of the political playing field.
“Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president,” was the quote from a troubled liberal professor. That seems a fitting summary.
Utopian ideals are always “bewitching†for those who choose to ignore historically observable reality. Explosions like the one we experienced this week have, on the positive side, the fortunate tendency to awaken these dreamy sleepers. Let’s hope it has jarred enough of them back into a state of semi-consciousness.