An Open Letter to George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States

Dear Mr. Bush,

If we had known eight years ago what the first decade of the 21st century held in store, there would be no question that you would never have been elected to lead this republic. The truth is, most of us have not seen times like this in our lifetimes, nor could we have predicted such an Orwellian nightmare.

Many of us had a clue, though, as it took weeks in 2000 for the Supreme Court to illegally get their fangs on the U.S. Constitution and hand a wreck of an election over to you. From there, we knew that we'd have to lick our wounds and wait for a brighter day.

Several months after you were elected, the world came to us raining in flame from the sky, telling you what they thought of America. Your response? Make war on innocent people. Look for a real-life Emmanuel Goldstein, that you would never capture, and create laws to spy on anyone who disagreed with you.

At the same time, although economies are never good during wartime, you focused very little on fair trade, regulating financial industries or the gross domestic product. You did focus on good P.R. and had an entire news network dedicated to convincing the world that you walked on water.

While you focused on creating terror overseas, not-so-natural terror took place right here in our own nation due to years of neglect that came long before your tenure. But your answer to Hurricane Katrina was to delay response, thousands died and millions are still picking up the pieces.

Maybe it isn't all your fault. This society is designed for both the heights of success and the depths of failure and we do get both every once in a while. Perhaps, looking back, historians will say that America was ripe for a pruning of its own materialistic culture and you just happened to be head of state at the time. I guess some of that will prove to be true, but circumstances notwithstanding, your choices were yours alone. Remember: "The Buck Stops Here."

Really, your time in office was a continuation of a presidency that I hated with every fiber of my being: Ronald Reagan's. Even though I was a kid when he was in office, all I remember from his tenure was crack, poverty and a patrician "let them eat cake" attitude. It was a time when unproductive wealth and greed was deemed acceptable. When you came in, I know that would continue.

Now, I'm not going to brag about Bill Clinton. As much fun as he was, I hated his foreign policy, and to me he didn't seem to be in black folks' corner as much as many might think. Looking at it from a historical perspective, he was more like Andrew Jackson and less like Abraham Lincoln. But I do remember families being able to take care of themselves, students able to complete their educations, I remember every voice being heard rather than being shouted down in the name of groupthink, I remember blue and white-collar workers saving for retirement.

All that disappeared by the end of your presidency.

As Obama begins his journey, none of us knows what will happen. We are in uncharted territory and expect rough terrain and stormy seas. But the rotten times wrought by your tenure have made us all rougher for the wear and probably more able to navigate what is to come, so there is some vague, strange feeling of gratitude deep in my psyche.

Still, even though times are uncertain, I don't feel an ounce of regret that you're gone. And I doubt many will disagree with me. It's not even likely that I will mention you very much because that is the degree that I'd like to move our society past your years in office.

So with eight years from our lives that we will never get back, we can look forward to a time when we will be without you. And that feels good.

In bidding you and your entire administration Good Riddance, I'll just say...

"So Long and Thanks for All the Fish."