It’s good to have hope for the holidays. It’s harder to define what’s meant by hope.
There’s the theological hope in the trinity of faith, hope and charity – associated with salvation resulting from the Christian grace of God.
There’s the very human hope of “I hope I get a puppy for Christmas.”
Then there’s the more ambiguous hope employed by soon-to-be-former First Lady Michelle Obama while shooting the breeze with Oprah Winfrey. As in, “See, now we are feeling what not having hope feels like, you know. Hope is necessary. It is a necessary concept. What do you give your kids if you can’t give them hope?’’
The cause for this despondency is, of course, the election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States and the imminent dismantling of much of what her husband Barack Obama wrought the past eight years. Mrs. Obama’s loyalty to the principles her husband stood for is both understandable and admirable. Loyalty is noble and you’d expect nothing less from her.
But this après nous le deluge comes from Mrs. Obama’s less noble impulses; those would be the ones expressed when she sourly said that her husband’s election as president in 2008 was the “first time in my adult life I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”
Mrs. Obama fails to recognize that:
- Obama sanctimony – on full display once again in her interview with Oprah – is a direct cause of the Trump phenomenon
- pitting people against each other has left many exhausted in America
- voting for her husband’s brand of a ‘hopeful’ future led to a return to a divisive past, and
- her side has lost the argument in 2016 and maybe a little reflection is in order.
Of course, what she and Oprah were really lamenting was not the loss of hope. What they’ll miss is playing the race/gender guilt card in the media that allowed them to get their way politically and socially since 2008.
Hope, in fact, died for America’s black community when it first made a tragic pact with the Democratic party and its social-democratic notions. It’s been a disastrous deal for urban blacks, who find themselves mired in the tragic trap of dependency.
The same issues afflict the British lower-class white community, which made its own tragic pact, this time with the Labour Party. The earmarks of black impoverishment in America – poor education, an aversion to conventional work, criminality, dependence on one political party – are all present in Britain’s poor whites (one in five adults has never held a job).
Like Michelle Obama, the Labour elites have an excuse: the problem is class. In America, Michelle Obama will tell you it’s all about race. (Remember how she turned a nice story on David Letterman about helping a little white lady get a package off a shelf? Two years later, she’d made it into a bitter tale of how whites expect blacks to serve them.)
It’s like the old joke about the boy who says, “Dad, I keep hitting my head everywhere I go there.” To which the father says, “Then stop going there.”
If Mrs. Obama really wanted to give her followers hope, she’d tell them to stop going there, stop voting for progressive policies that condemn them to perpetual misery. As Trump said in the election, “What have you got to lose?”
Troy Media columnist Bruce Dowbiggin career includes successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he is also the publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster.
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