After reading an op-ed piece by Canadian author Margaret Atwood in the NY Times two weeks ago, in which she excerpted her latest book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, I soon received a copy as a present. While there is so much amazing content inside to be discussed — her ability to gaze back at the world’s history and literature and find connections regarding the philosophical and moral implications of debt is startling — one idea in particular resonated deeply:

The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it’s good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle down, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall, but of a leaking tap; even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals. But everything in the human imagination and consequently in human life has both a positive and negative version, and if the trickle-down theory of wealth is the positive, the negative is the trickle-down theory of debt.

I find no irony that less than a year ago the biggest issues of the presidential election included immigration and Mormonism, yet when Americans pulled the slots on Tuesday the top dog was our bank accounts. Morals are fine until we lose our money — everything else takes a back seat at that moment, even our concern with war. And beside the sad and slightly deranged reality of Proposition 8 in California, our money — and by extension, our debt — was a huge deciding factor concerning the victory of Barack Obama.

Of course, Obama fans were fiending for change for many more reasons, even if our financial situation undoubtedly helped swing the swing states his way. As elated as many of us were and are at the outcome of this election, we should take heed to Atwood’s advice: everything in human life has both a positive and negative version. In my lifetime I’ve never witnessed so many people treat a politician as a savior, and I’m not convinced that’s such a healthy reaction.

Walking through New York’s Union Square over the past few months, I’ve noticed an increasing amount of Obama t-shirts selling like hotcakes. Many of them are the expectable bunch: Hope, Change, etc. Yet some of them posit the man as the Buddha, while others have placed his figure on top of an OM symbol. I don’t know exactly what relationship this man has with these symbols (except, maybe, vendors making a few quick bucks from NYU students). While he is unarguably a powerful and persuasive speaker and public figure, canonizing while alive anyone in such a manner cannot be helpful.

It’s not Obama who this sort of posturing hurts — he never demanded such from us. What’s in danger is our own damaged expectations. Yes, of course we needed and need a change in our current administration. On a political level that’s a given. The one place we can turn to now for true health, which is also the only place we’ve ever been able to turn, is inside of ourselves. We cannot give this or any other man or woman the power of our greatest hopes, for we’re only going to let ourselves down. This is the part of the “negative” of the victory: lionizing Obama and then expecting the world’s troubles to fade away.

This is not meant to be a “negative” assumption. I am as happy as any of the 64,266,126 of us who pulled Obama’s name behind the curtain. (And remember, 56,649,169 of us are not so happy; how we deal with our reactions to them is also important and revealing.) I hope Obama can fulfill the changes he professes, probably more than any politician I’ve come across in my life. But if he does not achieve what he has promised — and it will be hard, considering the shape America has been in for the last eight (and by extension 28) years — we have to ask: did he let us down, or did we let ourselves down?

Expectations are dangerous beasts. In the discipline of yoga, we are seeking a balance between the forces of positive and negative, good and evil. This cannot be translated as what we like or want being “good,” everything else “bad.” This is very much like the trickle-down theory, in fact: the goodness of Obama will trickle down and change the country. No, it cannot work that way. We must first change our consciousness, and then accomplish it in the world. Considering the energy many of us are feeling this week, some sort of shift is certainly in motion. What we do with that momentum is now up to us.