When I left my first husband…

No, THAT’s not where we’re going, but work with me.

Remember how much you loved your first puppy…then he pooped on your bed…and you had to clean it up? But, were you mature enough to recognize that YOU were the one with the unrealistic expectations…or did you blame your disappointment on the dog? First husbands are sorta like first puppies.

The idea that followed me around for a year after I left my first marriage, with the gut-churning pain of food poisoning, was that this honyock had made a lie out of my entire life. I had BELIEVED his every golden lie. Or, if I hadn’t exactly BELIEVED, I had certainly given him the benefit of the doubt. I had rationalized, turned a blind eye, reassessed my priorities, adjusted my value system to compensate for the tidal waves of cognitive dissonance, developed eye twitches and internalized a rage so towering that for the first year of single-hood I had obsessive thoughts of electronic machines going haywire, exploding and killing my daughter and me. Yeah, I felt betrayed.

Five years later I started going to a therapy group for abused women. Yeah, marriage number two wasn’t so great either. It turns out that DIFFERENT is NOT the same thing as BETTER. Write that down if you’ve never heard it before. We’ll be using that idea later.

In addition to the group therapy, I also went to a private therapist. The greatest help from all the therapy turned out to be the day the therapist handed me some print-outs and asked me to take them home and read them, to see if they sounded like anyone I knew. They were about sociopaths.

Nope, they didn’t ring any bells. Not then anyway.

The thing about therapy is that we kind of expect instant results and that’s probably not what we’re going to get. Therapy may not pay off for a long time. We may not “get it” for a long time. Years. Maybe five. Maybe ten. If we work real hard at feeling not responsible for ourselves and our lives, we may never “get it.” We may keep on trashing our lives, and the lives of everyone around us.

Or, if we get miserable enough, we may have an epiphany…or a string of epiphanies. But, we CAN change our dysfunctional ways, eventually, maybe not before we’ve destroyed another generation or two. But seeds of sanity and reason will eventually send up sprouts, then buds, and, if we live long enough, if we keep even the tiniest door open in our minds, we may someday see a seed turn into a full grown plant with tasty fruit on it. At which point, we become wise old farts passing down great wisdom to our great-grandchildren.

*long deep sigh*

So, what does that have to do with “The Un-Bush”? And who is “The Uber-Bush”?

Don’t play coy with me! You know full well that Obama is the Un-Bush. Let’s count the ways Obama is NOT Bush.

He’s not white. He’s half-white.

He’s not “old.” He’s a Baby Boomer (born between 1946 and 1964.)

He’s not a Republican. He’s a Democrat (the other “official” American political party.)

He’s not a war-monger. He’s a war-prolonger.

He’s not in bed with business. He bails out business.

He’s not a cowboy in the Old West. He’s a dude in the Old West.

He’s not a power-grabber. He’s a Czar appointer.

He’s not a torturer. He ignores torture.

He’s not a vote overrider. He ignores voters.

He’s not indifferent to health care. He controls health care.

He’s not an outsourcer. He’s an influxer.

Let’s stop listing now. I think the list is long enough for us to be able to determine that Obama is, indeed, NOT Bush.

Obama is the Un-Bush.

Obama is DIFFERENT from Bush.

Obama is NOT BETTER than Bush. Obama is a CHANGE from Bush. America hoped for eight years to CHANGE Bush to something DIFFERENT, and they’ve done so.

Now, go find that piece of paper where you wrote down “DIFFERENT is not the same thing as BETTER.”

You see, sometimes we humans can suffer from something so much that we begin to think, “THIS thing needs to be CHANGed to a DIFFERENT thing!”

It’s a common mistake that we’ve all made at least once. We usually make that particular mistake a number of times in our lives before we figure out that it is NOT CHANGE that we need. It requires a certain number of failures before we finally figure out that CHANGE is not the operative word in improving our lives.

The word we need to focus on is IMPROVE or BETTER. We don’t just want something bad CHANGEd. Anything bad can be CHANGEd for something WORSE. Anything bad can be CHANGEd to something of the SAME quality, BUT DIFFERENT. It was never our intention to change Bush into something simply DIFFERENT. We wanted him changed into something BETTER.

But, when the Pied Piper of CHANGE came along and began playing his tune about CHANGE, we forgot to use our thinking skills. We liked the word CHANGE. We liked the upbeat, hopeful tune of his music. We liked all the ways he SAID he was DIFFERENT from Bush.

Eventually we focused on his repeated chorus of CHANGE, CHANGE, CHANGE, and forgot everything we knew about how real life works. We liked the fairy tale tune he played for us, and we began to believe him when he said that CHANGE equaled HOPE. We HOPEd he was right. And we voted for him. And he became our CHANGE.

Now we resent him. Just like we resented the cute, wiggly, little puppy who pooped on our bed. Just like I resented my first husband. No matter how many people hand us print-outs about sociopaths, or psychopaths, or fascists, or wolves in sheep’s clothing, we refuse to see that we were not really children following the Pied Piper’s tune. We were not ignorant. We were not helpless.

We don’t want to feel like we participated fully in our own beguilement. We don’t want to feel like doofusses who were easy to fool. We don’t like to think that we got flim-flammed. We don’t want to put ourselves on the same “level” as the uneducated citizens of a banana republic who voted in a corporate-backed puppet of a dictator.

We don’t want to think that our lives were so bad, so oppressive, so frightening, that we suspended all we knew about the world, and suckered for the oldest political lie in the history of politics – that ANY CHANGE MUST be an IMPROVEment.

We were looking for the Un-Bush; what we got was the Uber-Bush.

We made a mistake. We don’t need more time to think about it. We don’t need to give Uber-Bush more time to morph into Un-Bush. He’s already the Un-Bush! He has already given us all the CHANGE we asked for, because that’s all we asked of him: that he be DIFFERENT.

So, what can we do?

The first step is to recognize that we made a mistake. The most important thing to do is the second step: We must completely forgive ourselves for making a political mistake. We aren’t the first country to make a political mistake. We won’t be the last. We must start right now planning how we will avoid making the same mistake in 2012. Remember that DIFFERENT is NOT BETTER!

The Republicans gave us Bush. The Democrats gave us Uber-Bush.

Please don’t try to drag Obama and 300+ million Americans into couples therapy. It won’t work. Bushes and Obamas (like sociopaths) have no reason to change. Politicians (like sociopaths) never have a reason to change. They (like sociopaths) can always find someone (or a group) who will accept them just they way they are, so they have no reason to change to please you. They can just go get jobs as well-paid corporate officers, and wield all the power they need in that arena.

Yes, it will be painful for you, but you want your life IMPROVEd. They (like sociopaths) will thrive wherever they are because there are always more inexperienced people to adore them. If you think I don’t know what I’m talking about, feel free to ask a therapist who specializes in couples therapy. Politicians and ex-spouses do just fine with fresh inexperienced partners. You just go on and make a BETTER choice next time.

There are over 300 million disgruntled citizens in America alone who will be right by your side as you begin to make the CHANGEs necessary to IMPROVE life for yourself. We all want IMPROVEd lives.

Just don’t forget that it was the reigning political parties in YOUR country who dragged you down into your present misery. CHANGE your political parties to IMPROVEd, BETTER, DIFFERENT political parties.

Or you could CHANGE your political parties to no political parties at all. Some people experience a failed marriage (or three) and choose not to ever get married again. You could choose not to have any particular political affiliation, couldn’t you?