Obama Dreams While Snowden Flees

Dear Mr. President,

The horse has bolted! Snowden in Moscow, headed to Equador, no extradition and relative safety. So much for our “good partners” in Hong Kong—the unintended consequences of spying and hacking allies and enemies alike with arrogance and disdain. So much for the divine right of the all mighty and all powerful Security State. And so much for your claims of transparency and civil liberties. I keep wondering if you really believe the lies and obfuscations you mouth in public, if you’ve come to believe your own stories of justice and truth, of legality and law, if you don’t sometimes have qualms about the distance between what you say and what you do. There’s a story in Dreams From My Father, chapter 3, where you father is coming back to Hawaii to visit and you tell your Punahou school chums about how he is a prince of his tribe in Kenya and your grandfather is the king and “…a part of me really began to believe the story but another part of me knew what I was telling them was a lie…” You described that conflict in yourself so vividly, something I think we can all relate to and I wonder if you feel that same conflict now as President or if it no longer bothers you to lie and dissemble, to slide around truth and justice. In the introduction to the 2004 2^nd edition of Dreams From My Father, you wrote this: “I know, I have seen the desperation and disorder of the powerless…how narrow the path is…between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder—alternating as it does between dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware—is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.” These words written by you in 2004 are nothing less than astonishing when compared to your actions as president. I have pondered for days since reading that passage, how a man who can write those words with such wisdom and insight can order the assassination of perceived enemies without a qualm, can ignore the Constitution and the laws of the land with the arrogance and hubris of a demigod or tyrant, can persecute those who would protect freedom and democracy and bask in the temporary glow false power. Who are you, Mr. President? What happened to the man who wrote those words?