Obama: A Tale of Betrayal and Cowardice

Dear Mr. President,

In Dreams from My Father, you go deep into the psychology of race, of powerlessness, suppression and rage. Your description of how capitalism destroys cultures and then abandons them is brilliant. Your ruminations on black identity in White America is profound; the desperation and hopelessness in the projects of Chicago where you worked as an organizer gives us some insight into the causes of despair and lack of cohesion and community. As I read this section of your book—Chicago—I kept flashing on where you are now, sitting in the White House, a seat of power and playing the game the way it’s always been played—backroom deals and secret handshakes. How you’ve abandoned and betrayed not only all those people in Altgeld Gardens on Chicago’s South Side, but all the people who elected you, who longed for the change you promised to bring—a return to the rule of law, to morality, to the end of unjust wars and the maldistribution of wealth, to a transparent government and to a reining in of the Banksters on Wall Street. But no sooner did you take office than you grew deaf to the voice of conscience and morality, blind to the suffering of others and divorced from your own humanity. When you wrote that book in 1995, you understood and clearly wanted change, but over the intervening years you changed, turned your back on all that and lost your moral compass but kept up the pretense, and it make me angry that you had the talent, the ability, the rare opportunity and the moral obligation to make a difference, to deliver on your promise of Hope that you campaigned on in 2008, and you threw it away, squandered something that may not come around again for decades—if ever—and the desperate lives left in the wake of your betrayal is on your shoulders, on your conscience, on your soul for all eternity. It is the most immoral, most evil kind of betrayal and one label for that is “traitor.” You are the real traitor to America, Mr. President, not Snowden, not Manning, not Drake or Binney or Kiriakou or any of those who stand up for freedom and justice. Compare yourself to Snowden: he risked everything to reveal the truth, gave up everything—a comfortable life, a comfortable job, a secure future—to expose the high crimes and misdemeanors of your government, knowing his life would never be the same. You, on the other hand, have never risked a thing. You play it safe, take the easy way, the path of least resistance. You are not only a traitor, you are a coward.