This article “Barack Obama and good vibrations” by Mark Morford in the SFGate (San Fransisco Chronicle) gives me the wiggins. Deep down, make your tummy sink and your nape hairs stand up wiggins.
Here it is in it’s entirety:
Barack Obama and good vibrations
I find I’m having this weird little debate with colleagues, readers, liberals and moderates and deeply depressed Republicans and spiritually amped people of all stripes and, in particular, with those who seem confused, angry, nonplussed, as they all ask me the same thing: What’s the big deal about Obama?
I, of course, have an answer. Sort of. It goes likes this:
Barack Obama ain’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.
This is what I find myself offering up in response to the whiners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional karmic antennae, to all those who just don’t understand all this chatter about Obama’s aura and MLK/JFK-like vibe, and, therefore, even if they’re liberals, they’re refusing to vote for him because they just aren’t feeling that deeper connection or, worse, they actively dislike Obama, believing him to be a slick and dangerous pawn of some sort of sinister machine they can’t quite define.
To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the draw, the ethereal thing that keeps drawing millions of people in from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of the culture normally unaffected by politics? No, it’s not merely youthful vigor or handsomeness or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn’t have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a high-vibration integrity.
Dismiss it all you like, but I’ve heard from far too many smart, spiritually attuned people who’ve been blown away by Obama’s presence – not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence – to say it’s just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile, soul-sucking lobbyist whores with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.
Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) I know identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of calmly enlightened being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of connecting with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a high order, and they reignite the soul.
The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually empty stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this is why he is so often compared to JFK and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose compelling vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.
Are you rolling your eyes and scoffing? Fine by me. But you gotta wonder why the JFK legacy has lasted so long, is so vital to our national identity? Yes, the assassination canonized his legend. The Kennedy family is our version of royalty. But there is something more. Those attuned to energies beyond the shallow, literal meanings of things say JFK wasn’t assassinated for any typical reason you can name. It’s because he was just this kind of high-vibration being, a peacemaker, at odds with the war machine, the CIA, the dark side. And it killed him.
Now, Obama. The next step. Another try. And perhaps Bush, who laid waste to the land and embarrassed the country and pummeled our national spirit into disenchanted pulp, has helped set the stage for an even larger and more fascinating stage of evolution in which we are finally truly ready for another Lightworker to step up.
I’m not arguing some sort of total revolution, a big happy global group hug with Obama as some sort of happy hippie camp counselor. I’m not saying the man’s going to swoop in like a superhero messiah and stop all wars and make the flowers grow and birds sing and solve world hunger and bring puppies to schoolchildren.
I’m certainly not saying he’s perfect, that his presidency will be free of compromise or fat-cat insiders or a great ugly heaps of politics as usual. While Obama’s certainly an entire universe away from George W. Bush in terms of quality, integrity, intelligence and, overall, inspirational energy – well, so is your dog. It isn’t hard to stand far above and beyond the worst president in American history.
But there simply is no denying that extra kick. As one reader put it, in a way, it’s not even about Obama, per se. There’s a vast amount of positive energy that’s been held back by the armies of BushCo darkness, and this energy has now found a a lightning rod, and is now effortlessly self-organizing around Obama’s candidacy. People and emotions and ideas of high and positive vibration are automatically drawn to him, because it is clear he is of the same material. It’s exactly like how Bush was a magnet for the low vibrations of fear and war and oppression and aggression, but, you know, completely reversed. And different. And far, far better.
Think that’s all a bunch of tofu-sucking New Age BS and Obama is really a dangerously elitist political salesman whose inexperience will lead us further into darkness because, when you’re talking national politics, nothing, really, ever changes? I understand. I get it. I often believe it myself. Not this time.
– Mark Morford columns with inset links to related material can be found at sfgate.com/columnists/morford.
Mark Morford’s column appears Wednesdays and Fridays on SFGate.com and in Datebook. E-mail him at mmorford@sfgate.com.
This article appeared on page E – 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle
