Open Thread

Rob, if I remember correctly, you are thirty years old. The year you were born, people were talking about the Civil Rights movement as over, as MLK was over 10 years in his grave, the Black Panthers were passé, and their leaders in prison, or becoming Republicans, and black people were beginning to be sprinkled into the lives of America on television and movies, so all was well. The women’s movement was still seen as only an excuse for women to have pre and extra-marital sex, with a legal abortion to take care of mistakes. The glass ceiling of employment and cultural inequality of women was still a fight to be fought. The gay rights movement was still in its infancy. No one who wanted to climb the corporate ladder, or lead a life in the public eye dared come out of the closet, and the ghastly specter of AIDS was just beginning to simmer in the veins of the multitudes of people who would all be dead in the next fifteen years.

I read a book by a Christian apologist who said something to the effect that Christ needs to come back every thirty or so years and be crucified again, because people just don’t remember the pain, the sacrifice and the true significance of the event if they don’t see it, if it is not fresh and new again. Whether one is religious or not, that is not the point or importance here. We, as human beings, are not prone to great remembrances. We leave that to professionals – historians. As we grow up, we complain of learning history, of memorizing the deeds of dead people, and paying too much attention to the past. We sacrifice the monuments and treasures of our past to the rubbish heap, in our fervent quest for the new, always the new.

Today is important. Today is important, because we are emerging from the tunnel of 8 years of failed policies, death and destruction of Biblical proportions, and the squandering of international regard and good will. We are in the middle of an economic overturning, a global shift in how we use and regard the environment, and an ever growing series endless, stupid wars, with the threat of pandemic disease and poverty overwhelming much of the world.

Into this maelstrom, we are inserting our first African-American president, a man who came from nowhere to win the election, going against the power elite, the well known names, and the conventional wisdom that a black man could not be elected in 2008. Today is important, because he is the proof that all of those people who denied us education, employment, transportation, shelter, and even life were wrong. For every person lynched in the South, denied equal education or a commensurate job in the North, a house in a good neighborhood anywhere, and the ability to go as high as one can, because one has the brains, the ingenuity, the commitment to rise above their allotted “station”, the inauguration is important. For the first chance in years for this country to go down the path we have strived to be on since the Framers, this inauguration is important.

Obama is not perfect. He will make mistakes, he is only human, and surrounded by other humans, and all of us have our baggage, our issues, our pet projects, our prejudices and pre-suppositions. For the first time in a very long time, we have hope. That is the most important thing he brings us. Not his race, his religious beliefs, or his policies. At this time and place, he makes us proud to be American, glad to be alive in this time and place, and eager to see what’s next. I’m going to be glued to the screen, with tissues.

44 will be no different than those before him, nor will he be different than those to come after. Politics is politics and it has already been shown 44 is more of the same.

Every 4 years we elect a president. This is no different. If you look at 44 based on platforms, appointments, etc, he is no different and nothing special.

I just hope this rabid fandom surrounding him and his election does not cloud people’s judgment when he needs to be held accountable for mistakes and missteps he is undoubtedly going to make starting this afternoon (based on the fact that, against popular opinion, he is not infallible and every president ever has made mistakes – so too will he and he must be held to the fire just as those before him have, regardless of historical implications).

Just my .02

rob- not all that many years ago when I was in an interracial marriage, my ex and I would be walking down the street together and someone wold invariably drive by and scream out the window “n**ger! and N**ger-lover! Other variations included the words slut and whore.

My friends brother was refused a job because of his skin color (and the company had been stupid enough to write the remark on his application.)

Another friend was treated like a servant by a bride who didn’t understand the this woman went to Yale on a scholarship and had an IQ at least 50 times higher than hers.

I was a kid when I saw a Black man thrown out of a Howard Johnson’s in New Jersey bcause he was Black. I saw a young boy beaten up by older white kids in the neighborhood where I grew up.

A friend in high school moved to NYC because they woke up one night to find a cross burning on their lawn.

Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Little Rock, Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Nat Turner, Dred Scott, the Underground railroad….just those few names don’t ever begin to cover the scope and depth of the change that hapens today. I have to say if you don’t get what this inaugeration is about, you’re really losing out.

Thank you DIBS, that was/is the most awesome post.