Today we (knowingly) inaugurated our first black President.
Knowing this leaves me feeling good about the world.
Not that I think Obama fixes racism.
He’s one more milestone along a long road toward healing the moral atrocity that was slavery.
Though, I’ll admit a quiet hope that we are approaching a tipping point.
Maybe someday, I’ll live in a world without hunger or discrimination.
This isn’t simply the unbridled optimism of the incoming administration.
Though I must admit I’m impressed by their political adroitness.
Obama seems to have learned to play the game and not have paid for it with his soul which seems a rarity these days.
In the unlikely event he turns out to be a horrible President, however, I am still hopeful.
Because he is a change. He’s a black guy. This is America.
Black people were property about 200 years ago — bought, sold, traded and killed like so much livestock.
Each and every person in this country, be they conservative, liberal or progressive, can take hope from the simple reminder that change happens.
The world today is not the world of 200 years ago. The future is demonstrably unwritten
I didn’t really get the quote, “today is the first day of the rest of your life,” until recently.
Every day is a new opportunity to answer the question, “am I getting what I want out of life?”
Every moment is another opportunity to choose a new path if I’m unhappy with the one I’m on.
I have choice.
That’s really why I feel hopeful when I think about Obama. I see that I have choice and I see that I live in a world where it seems like other people might know it as well. I do think that we’re near a tipping point. I know several people my age who, like myself, woke up, decided what they were doing wasn’t right for their lives, and quit. Nice quiet respectable departures from the rat race, complete with notice and savings and budgets.
Where will these people go and what will they create?
2 comments ↓
Few people seem to recognize that O. has himself done nothing special… he was the occasion by which America demonstrated that her citizens *already did not* consider the color of one’s skin a barrier to electing a president.
That is truly good news.
But your phrasing concerns me… as horrific as slavery was (and is), America played a very small part in slavery relative to the world, and helped lead the way in abolishing the practice in most of the world.
So while we should consider with gravity the wrongs of our past, that needn’t stop us from acknowledging the things that were done to right that wrong, and to see it in its proper historical perspective.
I think that to characterize Obama as an uninvolved spectator to his election doesn’t line up with the facts of the election. Obama made some controversial decisions, but I think he handled several hurdles with a rare political acumen.
I don’t think that America would have elected just any black man President.
My perspective on slavery is different than yours. You see slavery as ending when the laws changed.
In my mind, the evil of slavery was the idea that one person could exercise control over another based solely on the color of their skin. The laws of the time reflected this injustice, but they were not the cause of it.
Discrimination of all sorts continues to exist in America and, as such, the fundamental injustice of slavery continues to exist. The struggle has progressed, victories have been won, but the road is long yet.
I’m an anarchist though. I think that when someone lies to agree with their boss or does work that they think wastes their time, they are being fundamentally disrespected.
It’s a pretty extreme position. The only reason I like it so much is imagine a world where the driving motivation was to respect everyone’s wishes for their own life as much as possible.
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