Michelle Obama, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, said she was now certain that her husband's victory had inspired people because "now we're feeling what not having hope feels like." She added, "What do you give your kids if you can't give them hope?"
Clearly, the first lady means to imply that her husband offered hope, while Donald Trump does not. We all remember how her husband ran on the themes of "hope and change."
Many of us, however, hoped the country would not be so stupid as to accept these vague, purely emotional themes uncritically. Unfortunately, we were wrong — twice!
Michelle Obama talks about "hope" as if the emotion has no meaning or definition.
The harder question she fails to address is "Hope — for what? And for whom?"
In order to be hopeful, you are implying that you’re hopeful about something. I know that seems childishly obvious, but apparently not to the Obamas. Barack never promised anything other than more government.
How does government offer hope, other than as a protector of rights such as the right to free speech, the right to self-defense and the right to private property?
Or, the right to be free from Islamic or other barbaric invasions?
Obama promised none of these things, and his years in office clearly demonstrated that he cared nothing for them. He only cared about growing the government to provide more mediocre, unearned "goodies," more control over the lives and choices of individual American citizens — music to the ears of uncritical voters who will happily sell their votes to keep getting that free stuff.
Rationally defined, hope is a desirable, uplifting emotion. But it can’t exist in a stagnant or authoritarian society. Obama’s policies gave us less hope, not more. Obamacare took a dysfunctional medical system and made it even worse.
He bashed businesspersons and entrepreneurs — condescendingly telling them "you didn’t build that" in an effort to instill unearned guilt instead of the pride that comes with innovation.
Obama turned everything into a race issue and encouraged his supporters to blame all dissenting opinion on "institutional racism." He blamed American "Islamophobia" for each Islamic-inspired terrorist attack, effectively bringing terrorism back to America’s homeland for the first time since 9/11.
He encouraged Black Lives Matter — nothing more than a black supremacist and anarchist group — and in the process brought violent crime and the cold-blooded murder of police back to our city streets like we haven’t seen since the 1960s or 1970s.
So these things are "hope," Michelle?
The only thing we could call "hopeful" about the end of you and your husband’s years is the elimination — or at least reduction — of big, intrusive, clunky, ineffective, unjust, and race-baiting government.
Everything America’s Founding Fathers were against was exemplified by the miserable administration of this amateur and yet sadly coddled president. The memes on Facebook and elsewhere saying, "President Obama: The End of an Error" sum it up perfectly.
Leave it to the eternally smug Oprah Winfrey to provide Michelle Obama the forum in which to spread the party line that a president can inspire hope and confidence merely by uttering the words to an unthinking public. If two terms of Barack Obama reflect an American population immersed in the meaningless pop-psychology nonsense of Oprah Winfrey, then Donald Trump’s success in winning the presidency suggests an at least partial resurgence of sanity.
If it’s hope you’re looking for, then support rational and innovative ideas. Economic freedom, individual rights, self-responsibility and innovation are all associated with the social system of free market capitalism. Money does not buy happiness, but economic freedom, combined with the values of free speech and the right to self-defense, guarantee a permanent condition of growth and progress.
For its first two hundred years, America (through its protection of freedom) demonstrated this better than any civilization in human history. Obama and his ilk seek to take us back to an era where governments ruled everything and everyone.
Only someone immune to Oprah’s fawning, delusional and self-congratulatory circle can hope to recognize that "hope and change" by such a definition is nothing more than self-destruction.
Obama never provided hope for anyone.
He hijacked the term and made it his calling card, and the rest of America paid the price.
Good riddance to Obama, his wife, and their hopelessness.
Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D., LCSW is a psychotherapist and author with a private practice in coastal Delaware. He is the author of “Bad Therapy, Good Therapy (and How to Tell the Difference).” For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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