Only off by three years

"We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention authority in court," said Romero. "Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today."

14 thoughts on “Only off by three years”

  1. You know, Romero gets a point for declaring hope finally extinguished by Obama’s signing the NDAA. If he meant it. But I don’t believe he did. Obama’s next assault on civil liberties will probably get the same lament: huruu huruu, hope is now extinguished!

    Like

  2. “Hope” is the thing with feathers
    “Hope” is the thing with feathers –
    That perches in the soul –
    And sings the tune without the words –
    And never stops – at all –
    And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
    And sore must be the storm –
    That could abash the little Bird
    That kept so many warm –
    I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
    And on the strangest Sea –
    Yet – never – in Extremity,
    It asked a crumb – of me.

    Like

  3. Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead!
    Sit and watch by her side an hour.
    That is her book-shelf, this her bed;
    She plucked that piece of geranium-flower,
    Beginning to die too, in the glass;
    Little has yet been changed, I think:
    The shutters are shut, no light may pass
    Save two long rays through the hinge’s chink.

    Like

  4. “I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope,
    for hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
    wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing;
    there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting.
    Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
    So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

    Like

  5. Hope — Hope in the face of difficulty.
    Hope in the face of uncertainty.
    The audacity of hope!
    In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation.
    A belief in things not seen.
    A belief that there are better days ahead.

    Like

  6. Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. By their fruits shall ye know them.

    Like

  7. Hope is diminished daily,
    Yet can never be,
    Less than zero.
    Hope is the wind,
    That changes in,
    Force and flow.
    I hope,
    You find hope,
    And grow.

    Like

  8. I saw this in the San Francisco Bay Guardian a few years ago (written by one of two Democratic gatekeepers who have a history of berating the actual left in San Francisco):

    …I’m starting to feel naïve, as if all my critics were right and that I was foolish to feel hope in the first place. Is this when hope dies?

    No, that’s what it feels like when false hope dies. Next time choose more carefully where you put it.

    Like

  9. While on the subject of poetry . . .
    How fortunate we were
    not to have been exposed
    to rhetoric
    — it would have falsified
    a simple experience;
    living grimly,
    grimly enduring
    Oh there was occasional heroic posturing
    mainly from the immature
    — and a dash of demagogic bloodthirstiness
    But generally
    we were simply prisoners
    of a system we had fought
    and still opposed.
    (Dennis Brutus, “Letters to Martha”

    Like

Comments are closed.

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started