Wednesday, March 19, 2008

What Obama said

I read Obama’s speech on racism in America. What I took away from it was a depressing feeling that we are all VICTIMS in Barack’s eyes. He threw us all into the same pot and called us victims of disunity.

And he left no one out. How sweet of him to be inclusive. The white man who has lost his job to offshore competition. The woman who has hit the glass ceiling. The illegal alien. Asian, black, Hispanic, white…only the elderly were excluded.

Who are the bad guys in Obama’s drama? Who are his “real culprits”? He tells us “a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.”

And what are the solutions? Obama says, “by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations.”

And for good measure he talks about banning the scarcity mentality. Would you all please just “realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.”

I’m not sure what we have been doing here in America for the last 40+ years, but obviously Obama has a different solution. Why do I picture him in the Oval Office sitting cross-legged on the floor with the movers and shakers of America and the world, validating one another and singing Kumbaya? At the end of the meeting our unity has solved all of our problems including taxation and the national debt.

I must come to the defense of Obama’s grandmother, the woman who raised him. Perhaps she expressed her dislike for black men because the burden of raising little Bar fell squarely on her shoulders when Obama’s black father abandoned the family and his mother decided to help the poor in Indonesia. Perhaps the way the Kenyan treated his family colored her view of all black men. All he could say is that she made him “cringe” to hear her talk that way.

I suppose there were times when she wished her hippie daughter had been more responsible as well, but we’re not in to liberal bashing at the moment.

Obama put his grandmother up as ballast against the preacher Jeremy Wright. He wants us to believe she is the anti-Wright, symbolic of whites who don’t understand the plight of black people, creating the need for racist sermons. Someone who doesn’t understand black people.

Maybe so, but I think she’s just a pragmatic woman who keeps her opinions to herself and did her best to raise the child of a marriage she never approved of in the first place. Typical behavior from the Greatest Generation. Barack should be ashamed of himself.

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