So Chelsea Manning was commuted by Obama's administration today. Wow I am so happy about that. She was a political prisoner who was given 35 years under the espionage act for leaking documents to wikileaks, but now she will get out in May after serving 7 years. I will give credit to Obama and his administration for this but also point out that this is why it is so important to put pressure on our politicians, even if we like them. There has been a sustained campaign to free Manning before Obama left office.
I harp on this a lot to anyone who will listen. So many of my peers are complete Obama apologists to the point of fact denial and I feel that is dangerous. I get it. Obama is a the kind of man you want to root for - dignified, elegant, graceful and truly a once in a generation talent. He and his family symbolize a lot of great things in our country. But we should not get that confused with the fact that he has been in the most powerful position in the world and his day to day dealings affected the lives and deaths of thousands across the world. On the subject of the day, this administration has been more ruthless towards whistleblowers than any other in American history. Far worse than Bush. Manning's treatment in prison was absolutely brutal, bordering on torture. When the prevailing attitude of people on the left-ish side of the spectrum is to either make excuses for or ignore the darker aspects of Obama's policy, he and the larger apparatus of the state are able to get away with so much more. The point that I will never stop pushing is that there is a reason to be more critical and more idealistic than seems reasonable towards our own leaders. We are the most powerful nation on earth so perhaps we have a responsibility to not always assume good intentions on the part of our leaders just because we happened to have voted for them or like them. We identify way too much with our elected officials and we really demand too little from them. Who knows. Maybe I should just give up trying to persuade people around me. It seems like what I am saying is obvious though.
So why bother with this when Trump is about to take power and things will get so much scarier? I fear a sort of selective amnesia will take hold and people will view the Trump administration as an apocalyptic era existing in a vacuum of history, and fondly remember the past as a simpler time, rather than being able to soberly track the progression of US policy over the past few decades. We tend to see everything as good guys vs bad guys with one side blaming the other and I am already hearing childishly simplistic readings of world events (not that those are new, and my own understanding of the world is pretty limited.) Trump can easily push us into war with Russia, China or Iran but if we collectively forget that the US has been posturing and militarily choking out these major world powers under both DNC and GOP administrations for decades then we will never have the analytical tools to understand, critique and eventually change these things. The wealth gap has widened to an insane degree. Our carceral state has become a behemoth. Our education system is in shambles. Corporate and special interests are able to buy influence from US politicians in a brazenly open way. Police violence/brutality shows no sign of slowing down. These things didn't happen because of Trump. They may get worse under him, as they got worse under Obama, and under Bush, and under Clinton. Let's look at the structural causes that brought them into place and then figure out what major, bold and lofty changes we need to implement.
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