The US presidential debates are over, and we’re finally in the final stretch before this interminable election ends on November 4th. It’s been a soul-numbing two-year campaign that’s made even the preponderance of zombies in America weary. Does Obama need to lose for the American people to wake up? Can the dead come back to life?
The real question is whether Obama’s re-election would benefit or hurt humankind. To find that out, we’ll have to get deep into the weeds of spiritual, philosophical, and cultural issues that neither the pundits nor so-called intellectuals want to go anywhere near.
A man approached Jesus during his teaching, and expressed a wish to follow him. Then come, Jesus told him. He said he had to return to his village and bury his father. Jesus responded, “Let the dead bury the dead.” So is it a matter of “let the dead bury the dead” in America and all the Western countries where the people have died, because only the living matter?
Deadness does not follow party lines. If Obama is re-elected, what’s left of liberals in this country (a cartilaginous species that obligingly changed their name to progressives) would say, ‘We beat back the greasy tide of the rich taking over America, and now President Obama can get down to doing the great things he was intended to do!’
Hope dies hard, as evidenced by the fact that here we have a president who ran on hope, and yet drove the last nail into its coffin in America, but is now being held up as the last hope of progressives.
This despite (to name just a few of Obama’s disappointments): the useless surge in Afghanistan, costing thousands more 
lives on all sides; doubling down on the ‘war on terror,’ including a huge increase in extra-judicial killings using drones (not to mention ‘collateral damage’); continuation of wire-tapping of American citizens; and the promise of real change when the reality was that Barack, the ‘transformation president,’ was a conventional politician trucking in the same old calculus of calculation and money.
Of course if Obama loses and the election is close, knee-jerk progressives can blame restrictive voting registration laws in some states, and real or imagined rigging of voting machines in others.
Anything to avoid the real question: Why would so many Americans vote back into power the same nakedly oligarchic Republican party, with the same stated policies that gave us two unnecessary real wars, a fake perpetual war, a financial collapse leading to a protracted recession, and the besmirching of America’s reputation abroad through things like sanctioning and contracting out torture?
The answer is that the America people are dead. And though the dead equate speaking the truth with cynicism, or dismiss it as just another writer’s opinion, telling the truth is the only thing that can get us out of this vicious, dead-end circle.
Every day has become Halloween in America. TV commercials are filled with references to things that will make people feel more alive, and TV shows are rife with themes of the walking dead. Halloween has become a childish celebration of deadness by adults, rather than a catharsis of fear of darkness by children.
When a people die, they no longer matter to what used to be called Providence, and the inscrutable unfolding of human history. The fate of the American people was sealed when they elected George Bush the second time. Barack Obama was a hopeful flash in the pan, and whether he’s re-elected or not, it won’t matter to the human prospect. Mitt Romney would simply confirm the ‘new normal’ in this land, though he would be a disaster for humankind.
George W. Bush, the name that cannot be mentioned by either side in this infernal campaign, had a clear mandate from hell. It followed on the mission from hell of his father, President George H.W. Bush, now celebrated as the ‘good Bush,’ a newfound friend of the man who defeated him, Bill Clinton. The elder Bush’s job was to kill the American spirit, which he succeeded in doing with ‘the good Gulf War.’ George Junior’s mission was to kill the human spirit, and he’s gone a long way to fulfilling it.
So this election doesn’t matter for America as much as it does for humankind. And that means the first question is not whether the dead can come back to life in this or any land, but rather, can the inwardly alive, wherever they persist in surviving in the world, awaken?
To lead means a president, premier, or prime minister must follow both their own inner convictions and their people’s spiritual predilections. Romney has none of the former, but we won’t know if he has the pulse of the people until November 4th. President Obama, a man still adrift, remains a president in waiting—for the world’s living to awaken, and America’s dead to come back to life.
Martin LeFevre
