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Judith Angelo on Obama
My dear friends "out there on the left" seem to expect some sort of instant gratification. We did not elect a saviour, dear ones, we elected a far better option than what we'd have otherwise. His global warming positions are far more important than these geo-political games.
From Judith Angelo on Obama : (from Facebook)
"No one got to him. he has not changed -- this is the guy we elected to a position that is defined by the theater of "I" statements in a morbidly enmeshed polical-economic labyrinth : a strategic realist, a compromiser -- not a progressive.
The speech was revelatory not of who he is - true progressives told us all what to expect of this president all during the campaign -but how he thinks. and he also said that a holy war can never be a just war. he also left all references to abuse & suffering country-neutral, universal: he knows part of the 3rd world is in the USA.
I am not defending him- i never expected him to be able to change much of what we do as a nation, or to even make change the way i want him to- i expected intelligence & some transparency. What I am grateful for is THAT he thinks, that he feels morally accountable, & that he is preaching moral accountability as the missing link to true agency and integrity as an actor in the shrinking world. & i don't think he's a hypocrite to share how he makes peace with his conscience and his job. i think he is modeling the need for everyone to do so, and suggesting that developing a real conscience is different than passing judgements based on absolutes.
I hate a lot of what he's agreed to, i disagree with much of his strategy & decisions and it makes me nuts that he can't use metaphor and make every news conference a sharp commercial for the changes he wants to make.
But he is facing crises bred in the hearts of vain & visionless, careless & co-opted men who did not know or care that they were. & he is doing triage in the madhouse they set on fire.Cuz that's what we hired him to do."
The Nature of Order - The Luminous Ground
See "A Pattern Language", http://patternlanguage.com
From "The Luminous Ground" page 5
by Christopher Alexander, FAAA, Emeritus Prof. of Architecture, UC Berkeley, etc.
But this knowing of myself, and what was in my own true heart, was not only childish. Because at the same time that I recognized it in small things -- like cups of tea, leaves blowing off an autumn tree, a pebble underfoot -- I also began to recognize it in very great things, in works made by artists centuries away from us in time, thousands of miles away in space. In some thing which one of them had made, suddenly this childish heart, this me, came rushing back. I could feel this, for example, in the mud wall at the back of the sand garden of Ryoan-ji, I could feel it in the worn stone of a church, laid fourteen hundred years before. Somehow, I began to realize that the greatest masters of their craft were those who somehow managed to release in me that childish heart which is my true voice, and with which I am completely comfortable and completely free.
