Dreams From My President

[Geee]

American Thinker:

While others try to divine what really goes on in the mind of Barack Obama, all I know is what he says and what he does. Thanks to The Daily Caller, we now have one of the best summaries of Obama's philosophy ever caught on tape, uttered by the man himself, and without a teleprompter. He wants to quash our dreams and replace them with his.

For some reason, the part of this story that caught the most attention was Obama saying he "stole" the title of his book, The Audacity of Hope, from his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright (and actually listened to him). But to me, what followed was much more important, alarming, and ultimately enlightening.

First, let me provide the complete quote so you have the context. Obama was talking about what he learned from Rev. Wright.
He said, look, the easiest thing in the world to do is to feel cynical, easiest thing in the world is to find refuge in cynicism because there's so much good reason as you look around to feel dispirited. You open up the newspapers, you watch the news, there's war, there's poverty, there's ignorance, there's conflict, there's famine, there's strife, and so it's natural for many of us to at some point say to ourselves, you know what, not much is going to change.

The world is what it is and it doesn't make much sense to try to make it different. The best thing we can do is just look after ourselves, and protect our own little circle and make sure that we're making as much money as we can and pursuing our own private individual dreams but not really have a lot of confidence, a lot of faith in the possibility of collectively transforming the world.

And he said the hard thing to do, the thing that requires risk, the thing that requires a sense of boldness, audacity, is to hope, to recognize that somehow the world as it is is not the world as it has to be; that it's possible for us to recognize a stake in each other and to have mutual responsibility for each other and maybe not make a perfect world but to make it better for the next generation. And I loved that idea. I loved that idea in my own life because I thought that's a philosophy I believe.

Let's boil that down:

What Obama considers "easy" and "cynical" is "pursuing our own private individual dreams."

What Obama considers "hard," the idea that he "loved," is "collectively transforming the world."

I don't know how much clearer it could be. What he considers undesirable is "private, individual," and what he considers lovable is "collective transformation." He literally wants to quash our dreams, at least if those dreams are our own individual ones, and not his collectivist, transformative, and global one.

Obama loves the idea of putting the collective above the individual -- not just in the sense of "common defense," but in the very way we each carry out our lives. A self-reliant person, pursuing her own "private, individual" dream, is the cynic without hope. (Obama can read minds, apparently.) To be on the side of the angels, you must be part of the collective, transforming the world.

Obama's words are alarming and scary to me. I see tyranny emanating from their penumbras. How is "the pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence all that different from "pursuing our own private individual dreams"? Would Obama like to replace that phrase in the Declaration with "collective transformation of the world"?

But to many other people, those words speak directly to their hearts. And that is, down deep, what I think separates "liberals" and "conservatives."

I once read a liberal who, when confronted with facts and data indicating that letting individuals arm themselves with firearms actually led to fewer violent crimes, said, "But is that the way we want it to work?"