Opinions
Today he and others feel that Obama’s performance and its direction are souring his image. “Believe me, apart from diehard fans, most who cheered him in 2008 would hesitate today unless he’s facing a rattlesnake!”
This simple and peaceful orange-growing community of 2000 people nested around small lakes in Florida’s heartland reeks of individualism and stability. Its average income is half Florida’s average. People are polite and unhurried. There is no big factory, university or corporation. Before 9/11 it buzzed with property deals and other activities suggesting a confident and prospering community. The lakes are placid, lined with villas that rented readily to “snow-birds” from northern USA and Canada. Their licence plates were everywhere. “For Sale” signs were mainly on empty lots and, in built-up areas, on properties of those moving up or out or taking profit. Residents had work, one contractor noted, riding the building bubble to the point of complacency, earning enough to splurge on big box dreams: home improvement, HDTV, SUVs; take foreign holidays; buy investment risks and luxuries like boats, fine foods and drinks, not expecting that the wave would crest so soon. Wall Street was unknown except to bankers, brokers, chain-store executives and realtors. But there were prior rumblings. In 2001-2 a lot that had fetched $35,000 in the late eighties had fallen ten years later to $500, less than the annual tax, when the developer crashed; the county re-valued this same lot at $135,000 in 2007! The community was riding high.
Then the bubble burst and the cavalier financial shenanigans of Wall St made it a cuss-word. Even the temperature dropped the last three winters, hitting the freezing mark at night. The sun remains warm and the lakes calm and restful. But the shops are thinly peopled, the purchasing basic, the check-out counters reduced and even so the service is too prompt, the occasional full cart notwithstanding. Many trades and crafts sit idle and even the reduced contracts ironically get delayed - previously from brisk construction business - now from want of skills that have flown chasing hope. “For sale by Owner” and “For Rent” signs are everywhere; at this high season I would have expected “no vacancy” signs on motel billboards by 5.00 pm as in days gone by. Instead there are new signs like “bank-owned” and “modified mortgage.” All is not gloom however; the library is busy and welcoming.
Inevitably talk runs to solutions, focussing on President Obama, as if he had absolute power. Some swear that “this wouldn’t have happened under conservatives” (forgetting that Bush caused the crash and had given away the shop before Obama even started); these declare that “the health care bill will cripple America”, repeating Fox invectives verbatim. Others, especially large-city cognoscenti and Obama-sympathisers/critics, are more analytical. “Look at the people running his government - they’re like clones of the ones who caused the crash. Now those same crooks are getting richer with our money while people suffer. Where’s the mortgage relief as promised, and small business aid? Is this what ‘change’ means?” Others asserted: “He did himself in two years ago...chose all the wrong guys!” When I smiled one asked, “You don’t agree?” I hastened to say, “I do; I’ll send you, if you wish, a short piece I wrote then, even offering names.”
Businessmen are mystified that the principle of prudence imposed on small business could have been so blatantly ignored in the bailouts given and that miscreants continue to pocket so many billions, facilitated by the Fed itself!
“He should have let the bloody lot crash,” was the chorus, “sure, it would’ve been painful, but America has enough brains to have survived and come out ahead!” One added, “Ben Bernanke would be toast in my book, even today! And I’d fire the whole battery of Zionists running the show; they’re laughing all the way to Tel Aviv!” “Careful, they’ll call you anti-Semitic even though you’re half Jew!”
But if Obama looks sour he certainly revived somewhat and came through strong and proud in his nicely-measured speech in Arizona for victims of another murderous gunman in urging Americans to show “empathy” and engage in “civil and honest discourse”, not blame, a far cry from “cross-hairs” Palin’s strident talk of “blood libel” and call to celebrate “foundational freedoms” regardless.
With ‘retribution’ the bad past always returns
I developed tennis elbow a few years ago. I have wondered since what causes these muscles to feel as if they are being ripped off my left forearm.
My lovely wife took charge when I first developed the condition.
“You know why these things happening to you? I always telling you to change your ways. Remember how you used to laugh at that fellar who used to direct traffic on the main road when you were growing up? There is something call ‘retribution’. All these things will come back to haunt you.”
She was saying this while massaging the affected area with her panacea for all muscle pains – the pungent smelling Rub A535. Her annoyance at my “misbehaviour” in my boyhood, years before we even met, made her furious so that she unwittingly increased her massaging pressure on my arm. I winced with the additional pain.
“Your massaging making the muscles pain even more,” I pleaded.
“This will wake up the muscles and make them heal right away,” she said as she applied yet another dollop of the ointment on my arm.
But she had jogged a memory now in a faraway place when I was growing up “back-home”. The “fellar who directed traffic on the main road” was one of the many indigent persons who populated the towns and main city where I grew up. He spent his days in itinerant wandering, talking to himself at times with anger, his hands made into fists and gesticulating in an effort to drive away invisible enemies before him. At times he would stand dangerously in the middle of the roadway directing vehicular traffic with erratic hand motions for the sheer inner joy of it. Cars, trucks, motorbikes and bicycles whizzed past dangerously and rapidly. Drivers paid no attention, having learned to avoid him on the busy roads. Not a horn was honked with warning, not a brake squealed with caution. He was a fixture, very much like a traffic signal.
He was quite ill and unstable, and was unfortunate to have been born in a time, and place, that had neither the resources nor sensibility to take care of him. Sometimes he was teased by those in whom compassion was an alien thing. They would torment him, calling him derogatory names, motivated even more with his annoyed responses, his childish innocence, all for a cheap laugh. People can be so cruel to each other, particularly to those who are vulnerable, indigent and defenceless.
Decades later, I was paying “retribution” for describing to my dear spouse some of the taunts I overheard being used on the young man by adults who should have known better. In her mind I was guilty by association. And even guiltier for not speaking out, for not “opening my mouth and saying something,” for not doing what I do today when I encounter injustices such as these.
“But what does this have to do with the pain in my arm?” I complained.
“Imagine what it would be like to direct traffic for hours and hours. Imagine how tired his arms would have grown. There would be discomfort and even pain. Retribution catches up with all of us eventually,” she said with a significant look while applying a final, agonising rub on my arm.
Now I recall this young man each time my tennis elbow returns. I see him standing in an arbitrarily chosen spot on a busy intersection on the bustling roads back home. The taxis would be endlessly honking horns, the drivers leaning out of their windows to engage a potential passenger. The hulking government transport buses would lumber by, the large black wheels mere feet away from his toes. The numerous mini-buses would swim by in a haze of loud, thumping music, the drivers distracted, in conversation with a passenger, not seeing the side mirrors sweep past the soft, bald patches at the side of his head.
The young man would be stationary, standing like a pole. He would be drenched with sweat, the beads forming at the top of his prominent forehead and rolling down the side of his face. He wore no shoes. His feet would be dusty, dirt-encrusted. Shirt would be unbuttoned, the front pocket hanging from threads. The legs of his pants would flutter in the turbulence as the heavier vehicles hustled past.
And there was the repetitive action of both arms. A hand would be raised, palm up, as he held oblivious oncoming traffic back. The other would be beckoning the taxis onwards, the drivers sometimes humouring him with an acknowledging tap on the car’s horn. He did this for hours upon hours. Indeed, the muscles in his arm would have become sore. There would have been pain.
My tennis elbow has flared up again. I know why now. Recent back to back snowstorms have seen me lifting and throwing snow higher as I shovel the driveway. The pain in my forearm cannot be measured against the empathy I feel in my heart for this young man who suffered so unjustly when I was growing up back home.