A young Dutch woman joined a revolutionary movement in Colombia four years ago and now, having come to regret her new career, apparently is unable to leave. She’s being held captive in the Colombian wilderness by the same guerrillas she once idealized, as news reports explained last week. As I read about her plight, I weirdly thought of Barack Obama.

The news story started this way, which was all it took for my free-association thinking to kick in:

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — The army stumbled on the handwritten diary during a raid on a guerrilla camp. It lay near the embers of a communal kitchen where fleeing rebels left their breakfast untouched.

“I’m tired, tired of the FARC, tired of the people, tired of communal living. Tired of never having anything for myself,” wrote the author, a 29-year-old Dutch woman. … “This would be worth it if I knew I was fighting for something. But I don’t really believe that anymore,” she wrote on November 24, 2006, according to the excerpts released by the government.

A similar loss of belief, I realized, will hit us (again) about three years from now. We do the same thing every presidential campaign season: We become captivated by the new, fresh candidate who promises a better way of governing, who declares that the old, calcified methods of doing business will be swept away. Partisan differences will be set aside. Rancor and disputation will be replaced by reason and civility. It’ll be morning in America, and unlike the previous “mornings” this time it will be for real.

And then, a few years later, we wonder how we ever fell for such transparently fraudulent foolishness in the first place — which causes us to then look around for, yep, somebody different and new. Somebody who can tell us what we’re fighting for, and give us something to believe in.

This campaign season, the person who has become the repository of those hopes for change is Obama. (Or maybe Ron Paul, but I’m talking about the candidate who actually has a chance to win.) If he’s elected, he’ll surely disappoint us, but not because he’s flawed or incapable of handling the job. He’ll fail us for the same reason every other political leader fails us: Because we place our idealistic hopes in humans, who are so battered by varying pressures and agendas that principles are doomed to eventually fall away (leaving us disillusioned and surly), rather than in our magnificent system of self-rule, which is gloriously resistant to … well, our own unpredictable, ever-shifting wants and needs.

I think our collective placement of faith is exactly backwards. We’re disdainful of our institutions of government, so we invest our faith in the people who most convincingly promise to operate outside those institutions. In fact, the ponderous and unwieldy nature of our government is mostly a blessing, in that bad ideas and temporary infatuations (like the current move to kill the Electoral College) happily die of old age before becoming reality.

If we can remember that our idealism was perfectly captured in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, then it’s easier to think of our elected politicians as simple managers of the system, rather than leaders who are required to inspire us. They’re hired hands, not messiahs.

Once you get to that frame of mind, you’re much less likely to find yourself in some metaphorical wilderness, scribbling despairingly in a diary about your loss of faith.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 1:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.