In Obama We Trust?

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/in_obama_we_trust.html

I grew up in a home where God was MIA. I don't remember religion
being mentioned except occasional references to some sort of God and a
heaven. While my family was proud of their ethnicity, they didn't
practice the religion. Aside from the requisite Bar Mitvahs, they
never set foot in a synagogue.

My parents did worship at the altar of pleasure. They loved to party;
they lived for the times they'd go out with their large, rowdy group,
and dance and drink the night away.

I'm not sure why my parents were such party animals. It was probably a
way to escape the past, the memories of which were permanently etched
on the mournful faces of my grandparents.

The past: Atrocities in Tsarist Russia. Poverty in the U.S. Tiny,
noisy tenements in New York City; ghettos of immigrants from Ireland,
Italy and Eastern Europe huddled together.

My father's dad, desperate for money during the Great Depression,
accepted a dollar to name my father after another man's deceased loved
one.

Brazen anti Semitism; recurrent chants of "dirty Jew." WWII; the
enormity of the death camps and the guilt of being safely sheltered.

My father, with a little money saved from working 12 hour days,
reinvented himself. He changed his Yiddish sounding name to something
WASP'y, and moved the family to a look alike, tract house in the
'burbs. While the lifestyle was modest compared to middle America
today, my parents were euphoric, a state that continued even into old
age.

Escapees from the ghetto, no longer targets, my parents finally felt
like true Americans. They were happy as clams in their perfect,
sanitized life of black and white TVs, a washer and dryer, frozen
vegetables, and luxuries like bottled salad dressing.

When I think about my dad, I remember how he ate. Every morsel,
whether formerly boxed or canned, was exquisitely delicious, and he
savored each bite, murmuring "Mmm, mmm," like a man just rescued from
starvation.

My parents worked hard during the week, and then weekends traveled the
cocktail party circuit, dancing the night away. They were in
perpetual adolescence, recreating their lost childhood.

Meanwhile, I was a latchkey kid before the phrase was coined. With
my only hobby being shopping, I occupied myself with my friends, the
Addams Family, the Brady Bunch, Ed Sullivan, and Patty Duke. When I
was a teen, it became mind numbing sex and drugs and rock and roll.

Weekends there was so little to do that I slept in until 1 pm.
Occasionally I would tag along on a Sunday with my best friend and her
family who went on outings. I was astonished that an entire family
went out in the car for activities like picnics and museums.

It was a flat, colorless childhood with no strong arms to guide me. I
drifted along the best I could, like a lone, unguarded leaf.

College was a blur of hook ups, hard drugs, and parties as I was
speeding headfirst into disaster. Mercifully, in my early 20's, I
found my way to a few decent boyfriends who had brains and I gained
some myself, giving up my untamed habits along the way.

I settled down with my husband, Jon, a bookish type, who came from a
family the polar opposite of mine. Jon still jokes (?) that he helped
raise me.

Often Jon would drag me to talks by other brainiacs, where I would
summarily nod off. But I like to think I absorbed something in
between snoozes.

Eventually my life took shape: around my career as a psychotherapist
and my leftist crusades to change the world. I found religion, or
perhaps it found me.

I had just turned 30, an event that had given me the willies. Perusing
a book by Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa in a bookstore, I was
entranced by the novel idea that happiness is not the goal of
existence, but the byproduct of a life well lived; that the purpose of
life was truth not pleasure.

I started studying Eastern religion with a fervor, especially books by
Trungpa and Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh), and even called myself a
Buddhist until I shed most of my old identities a few years ago. I
became more of a heavyweight, able to look at the big ticket items of
life -- mortality, illness, and suffering -- because I was safely
nestled in the world of the Spirit.

I remember the moment I discovered God, in my 30's, when Jon and I
were on vacation. I was reading a light novel, and he, of course, was
studying some heavy tome. When I perused it and saw it was a religious
book, I asked him, "Do you believe in God?" (Yes I know it's bizarre
that it took l0 years for the subject to come up.)

I was bowled over when Jon said, "Yes." (He was also raised secular,
and had never previously mentioned the G word.) My eyes welled up with
tears. I realized that I did too.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the factors in my life that
lured me far Left for so long; what captivated me and held me there
even with mounting evidence that the ideology was bankrupt. And why
are millions still following the Pied Piper of Chicago, even though
he's looking increasingly more corrupt and vacuous?

And I've come to this: the Left is filled to the brim with people like
me, who grew up in homes with God in permanent exile and various
adults floating in and out in hot pursuit of self fulfillment. With no
way to understand life, this realm starts looking like an unmanageable
House of Horrors. The result: people turn to someone like Obama to
engineer a whole new world.

So we have a situation today with the Left in charge, preaching their
religion which is anti-religion. Their dogmas are so harsh that they
make the Torah look like a light summer read. The Left's missionaries
are trying to tame the savages (stupid white people) just as the
missionaries of old traveled abroad to tame the savages.

But, as survivors of Jonestown learned, a religion without a
beneficent God firmly in place, is a cult, and can destroy lives.
Those spiritual teachers I admired when I was young, Osho and Trungpa?
They turned out to be major pervs. They slept with their students,
even encouraged violence against them. Both died as a result of their
depravity.

Without some type of faith, people can remain in a state of ravenous
hunger, as needy and frightened as a little lost child. They're
looking for something, but all the roads are blocked off. The only
door leading to safety has been shut in their faces by a society that
rejects the Sacred.

So the masses flock to Obama because he offers them meaning and a way
to organize a chaotic universe. People believe he's some kind of
Messiah because they're frantic for a Prophet to create a heaven on
earth.

I saw a blog where a young person posts, "I have pictures of Obama on
my wall. He gives me a reason to get out of bed in the morning."
There are no rational arguments about bailouts and taxes that will
counteract this desperation for purpose.

Our culture offers youth nothing of substance to carve out a dignified
life. In the place of spiritual and intellectual richness, we pump
them up with noxious television shows and films, texting and sexting,
addiction to Facebook, and lots of drugs. We may have created a
Generation N, for Nihilism.

And it's not just the young. Baby boomers are being dragged kicking
and screaming into old age, without any spiritual guideposts and
within a culture that fears and despises anything old. In ancient
times, elders were revered as the cultural wellspring of wisdom and
tradition.

But in most of the First World, older people are as disposable as
yesterday's trash. How unacceptable to grow old in a culture that
finds no grace, only disgrace, in wrinkles, and wants to hustle you
out the door as soon as possible.

Baby boomers are also dancing to Obama's beat, enveloped in feelings
of hope and change, holding on for dear life to their long lost youth.
But it's not the real 60's with its hard drugs, violence, and
exploitation of women, but a fantasy, frozen in time, of peace and
flower power.

I understand the draw of Obama and liberalism and changing the world
because I know what it is like when life has no other meaning. I
understand how unbearable it is when not only one's parents but God is
MIA and school is a forbidding place, and drugs only temporarily blunt
the pain.

And I know the feeling of being so depressed that you grab onto
anything -- whether it's a bottle or a relationship or a guru --
anything that eases the despair, and you won't let go, even when the
consequences keep mounting. You won't let go until you find your way
to the truth.

And I know what it's like to wake up from the fog, to shake off the
dread, and to find that I'm strong enough to walk on my own two feet
and that a Higher Power lifts and carries me when I'm too weak to
stand.

If we as a culture don't find our way back to those young and old who
are lost in space, adrift and unanchored, they will embrace false
idols. For as long as Obama is the only game in town, the only way
people can feel alive and hopeful, they'll ignore every red flag and
defend Obama until their last dying breath. They must believe in him.
The alternative is just too unbearable.