Tonight marks the last night of George W. Bush's presidency. As we look back on his 8 years in office there are a lot of issues to think about. I think the most important thing that we must do is not forget. I even catch myself in the last days of him in office feeling complacent in my memory of him. That is not acceptable. He failed. He failed horribly. But it is no more than a judgment of us as a people. It is us as a people who failed. Just like an abused housewife who allows the awful things to happen to her, we as a people allowed this shitshow of a government to run this country into the ground. That is why we must not forget. It is because we cannot let it happen again. We must not forget how Bush lied to the people to go to war. How he politicized the biggest tragedy of the past century time and time again. How he mixed faith and politics. How he butchered Katrina. How he allowed torture. How he took money away from valid scientific research that could have saved lives. How he ruined relations with foreign neighbors. We just cannot forget all of that. This country has had a tendency in the past 20 years to strive to mediocrity. As if having people with an education if office was a horrible thing. We saw this during the campaign season. How Obama was labeled as an elite for graduating from Harvard and Columbia. How Palin was considered qualified after attending 5 different low-tier colleges. This type of acceptance of mediocrity is what got Bush into office. Make no mistake about it, if he lost in 2000, this country would have been a better place right now. The biggest argument I have heard people making is "well at least Bush kept everyone safe the past 7 years." Yea? Well at what price? At the price of detaining and torturing innocent people? Or at the price of instilling a politics of fear into the average citizen? Or, was the threat not that big to begin with?Regardless, now, fortunately, Bush will take his rightful place in the past. But we must use this past to guide our future.
1 comment:
One can't say that a president has failed until he's been out of office for a while. Until then, we don't know how his decisions will effect the country in the long term.
This was one of the arguements against putting Roosevelt on Mt. Rushmore, among the Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson, because no one knew if, in the end, his presidentcy would have been viewed as a success. Not enough time had passed to see.
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