America elected its first black president after the disaster of the Bush presidency.
In other words, because George W. Bush was such a calamity, a country struggling with deep real racial issues was ready to put Barack Obama in the White House. I’m not saying Obama wasn’t a great candidate. What I mean is that it likely wouldn’t have happened following a Gore presidency. It’s almost as if Obama grew out of the severed head of Bush.
In Greek mythology, Hydra, the many-headed water serpent, had a unique survival mechanism. When you’d cut off one of its heads, two more would sprout. Following this analogy, when Bush’s head was severed, not only Obama’s head appeared; so did the tri-cornered hat of the Tea Party.
Now that Obama’s time in the Oval Office is coming to an end, you have a situation where an extreme, racist, thin-skinned, crazy man like Trump could, in theory, become president — the pendulum swinging back so far as to smash out of its own casing.
Hopefully, the presumptive nominee will defeat him in the general election.
But the 2016 Hydra has given us not one, but two more heads. First, there’s Hillary, the first woman ever nominated by a major political party. But there’s also a 74-year old Senator from Vermont who has swiped the roof off the political process — and shown everyone how corrupt and broken our political system truly is.
Even though he will not be the Democratic nominee, he has already changed the way everyone thinks about income inequality in this country. We can’t un-know Bernie has taught us.
And that will reverse a corrupt and disgraceful trend that started in the 80s with Reagan.