People, You Elected Him for Change & It's Happening

Yes, yes, it's very dark out there on the economy landscape.  But so much has already happened since Obama took office.  Remember, we said (back in the "good" days of August) that he was inheriting a landfill's worth of problems.

How about some rage toward the fool in office before him? 

You think I do not have some complaints?  Certainly--more troops to Afghanistan, too much nodding toward the religious.   Of my gosh, he's not perfect.  Much less perfect is the shallow  media?  They could back off on the bankers for a moment.  And the annoying (to me) too-much-information, known in my family as TMI, about every dress/school/meal detail in the Obama family.  Actually I would like to hear from Marian Johnson, Michelle's mother about her friends on Social Security, what it's like to go from her former life to "retirement" in the White House.  Not going to happen because that might bore men and women under 50.

A worthwhile newspaper might focus on how close we've come to something like  single-payer health insurance.  Or that the administration has made moves that upset the Catholic Church and religious right who believed they had a won the struggle to make  abstinence, that bogus sex education notion, the law of the land.    Things undreamed of as within our reach  only a year ago.

The top image here was drawn on the a sidewalk at 111th and Broadway last summer.   Hani Shihada is the artist; I once watched him work  on a dark street in Greenwich Village.  By October it was still there, maybe touched up.  In January, I saw the black and white sketch  on a sidewalk at 13th and Spokane S.E. in Portland, Oregon.  Coast to coast we were very enthusiastic about Obama.  Now we live with him day by day as he tries to clean up multiple messes, some decades old.  I make mistakes so I assume he will too.

Comments

[Hattie]

I'm with you, as the shape of what Obama's doing is starting to emerge more clearly. Some measures he has taken are aleady having a positive economic effect on our extended family. This is what people have to see: that things will get better for them. And we are getting that little SS bonus, which is nice.
I'm reading Thomas Frank's excellent book, *The Wrecking Crew,* about the awful people who got us into this mess.
What must be avoided at all cost is scapegoating the poor. Let's scapegoat the rich for a change! Make ruthless fun of their absurd, ruinous "lifestyles."

[Rhea]

I have such confidence in him. I shudder to think where we'd be if McCain had gotten in.

[Claude]

Thanks for these photos, Naomi!