The Oracle

Issue date: 1/26/10 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: Allison Osberg

As Haiti crumbles, indigenous lands are being stolen to make copper mines, our water becomes poisoned and sparse and the economy continues to fall into the arms of this capitalist façade, it's hard to see how people can have much "hope" or feelings of "change" in the form of a democratic government. Indeed, as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon said, "democracy is nothing but a constitutional tyrant."

Unlike what we are taught in our cookie-cutter classrooms, not everyone can grow up to be president. Our democratic system is based on power, race and class. Only the millionaires are allowed to access power, and those positions of power are mainly occupied by white men.

Obama's election is nothing out of the ordinary. In 2008, the euro-centric, male-dominated U.S. government decided to use the symbolic figure of a black man as a form of tokenization to further negate the issues of race, class and gender in this country. I am not impressed.

"Look here, we're not racist. We have a black president!" cry the politicians, as ghetto cities are devastated by the nation's sweltering economy and the prison-industrial complex and horrendous educational systems. And you can't forget the staggeringly high rates of homicide, suicide, domestic violence and substance abuse that surround communities of color as they suffer under a white system of oppression.

The rules of justice and equality in the eyes of the law are nothing but the fetishized interests of the capitalists and politicians: the stockbrokers, the landlords, the police, the government and our very own president.

I'm supposed to write my opinion about "our" president, who somehow revolutionized the last election by becoming a token to an otherwise oppressed minority of people. I put "our" in quotations because we are ungovernable. Our freedom is not a condition in which we can check a yes, a no or an apathetic blank on a ballot card.

Our freedom cannot be caught up in this fabricated world of political ideologies. They want you to believe that democracy allows you the right to choose. Yet, we are only allowed to choose between the options of a few. We must be the ones to take over the decisions that dictate our lives. We must take power from the ones who supposedly represent us and put it into our own hands.

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