Musings of Maaia – Justin

As I rounded the Park Square traffic circle on Thursday evening, the usual motley crowd of anti-war protesters was displaced by a homogenous crowd of people holding signs attacking President Obama’s reputation in various creative ways. The most offensive of these was the poster of Obama sporting a Hitler mustache. Later that same evening, I received an email, supposedly by Dr. David Kaiser, stating all the similarities between Hitler’s regime and Obama’s. Now, my instincts told this was not worth my time. However, sometimes the only way to “let go” of something is to write it down, so here is my response to all of the people who find in Barack Obama a glimmer of such infamous figures of Adolph Hitler, The Anti-Christ, or the “Dark One”:

Can we please stop the hate? Or at least the shoddy scholarship? Not to mention a worse offense–a shoddy simile? There are quite a few glaring errors in David Kaiser’s comparison of Obama with the one who should go nameless.

For one thing, Obama doesn’t have a scapegoat that he likes to pick-on. Conservatives would like to think they are Obama’s whipping-boys, but the fact is that while conservatives hate Obama, Obama does not hate conservatives. He even holds some idea (delusion) that he, a liberal democrat, can appeal to conservative republicans with what he thinks are rational arguments and common-sense policies.  If he is guilty of anything, it is his naive opinion that he can bridge the gap between these two groups who do not speak the same language.

Another thing that is missing from the Hitler comparison is the fact that Obama does everything–even his “parliamentary persuasion tactics”–within the confines of American due process. Now you may not like it, but the fact that Obama rushed to pass healthcare reform while there was a majority in congress is a sign that he works within the law. True, he may do everything possible to obtain his goals, but that “everything” is always within the lawmaking process. He has never once tried to expand the powers of his branch of government. We must remember that the largest expansion of executive power in the history of the United States was not on Obama’s watch, but was the doing of one George W. Bush–a conservative republican (not without the help of many on both sides of the political divide).

Why is Obama compared with Hitler, when his administration has really operated no differently than so many others? I sometimes wonder if it is merely because of some half-cocked Bible-thumpers who have decided that a reference in the Book of Revelation to a “dark one who will come,” is a foreshadowing of the President.

Whenever I hear people try to blame all of the world’s problems on one person, it becomes obvious to me that those people have not taken the time to see the part they play in perpetuating the evil in the world. All of us has blood on our hands. So to those who label Obama as Hitler, I say “Shut the fuck up and be quiet. Meditate. Stop your discursive thinking for 40 minutes a day. You will become aware of the part you play in the suffering of the world, the part you play in perpetuating the suffering in your home, in your job, on the highway, in politics, and within yourself. You will become painfully aware of your part in that suffering, and then you will become blissfully aware of how to heal it. As Goethe said, “If everyone swept his doorstep, the whole world would be clean.” Or, as another great thinker and meditator said, “Remove the beam from your own eye before you try to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” Or do we now only read the parts of scripture that get us riled-up and ready to stone a scapegoat like Barack Obama?