A Great Disservice

Except for what is seen on television, many of us in this country have had limited associations with people of color, yet alone people of color in authority.  For some, seeing a black physician or having a black principal is commonplace.  But for a larger part of the country, not so much.  So I guess the amount of vitriol after the election of our first Black president should not surprise me.   Somehow, however it does.  The strength of the hatred evidenced in nonsensical aspersions hurts me, hurts us all.  And the ravings of the likes of Rush Limbaugh and other 'shock' jocks have done nothing but pander to and promote fear and rage and make it easier for others to make horrific statements and get away with them.  These demagogues have done us all a great disservice.

The most vocal of Obama's detractors  express such thinly cloaked animosity (sometimes not cloaked at all) at what often seem, at least to me, non-issues.  Or misconstrued issues.  A woman who lives in my mother's community was passing out leaflets entitled "This is How the Obamas Spend Our Tax Dollars".  It was about the First Lady visiting schools to fight childhood obesity.  And there are so many other examples.  When asked for specifics --"What exactly do you not like about this president"  the retorts are vague and non specific.  "He's going to abolish Medicare".  Not true. "He's a frivolous spender".  Not true, either.  In fact, he's spent less than the two previous administrations.

The anger is real and palpable.   It comes to me that this is not an election between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, but a referendum to remove  Barack Obama whose election four years ago marked a definitive and important milestone in our country's history and presented us all with an opportunity to evolve.    

St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that in negotiations of any type, progress will not be made until both sides  recognize the position of the other as valid.  My present objectives are to do just that.  I will openly and specifically state what I like about 'my' candidate and will abstain from name-calling and ignorant generalizations about 'yours'.  I invite the rest of the country to do the same. 

Four Little Words

Yesterday, I made progress with the book I'm currently reading -- The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb. I've read his other works, and this, like those is expertly crafted, beautifully written, but it's not a thoroughly pleasant read. I really need to take 'breaks' from the lives of the Quirks, the main characters and their tragic lives, and so I put the book down for a while, put a load of laundry in, and turned on the TV for a bit. That's when I saw it. The commentator on CNN was rehashing Rush Limbaugh's comments about Barack Obama. CNN replayed what Limbaugh said, "...I don't need four hundred words; I can say it in four. I hope he fails." Limbaugh then repeated the four words.

Flabbergasted at his mean tone, I sat there trying to process the statement. This is like saying, "I want the whole country to remain divided, partisan, and caught up in the strife of a failing economy. I want those people teetering on the edge of bankruptcy to lose their homes. I want the banks, the car industry, steel, to fail. Let's continue and increase our dependency on foreign oil, and build up that carbon footprint as much as we can." But then, I thought, maybe that's not what he is saying. Maybe Limbaugh is annoyed that his fellow uber conservative Republicans failed miserably and he wants to give them another whack at it? Maybe he is saying that total chaos and utter poverty are better than having a Democrat for president? Or maybe he is just a miserable, pill-popping, pusillanimous, contentious demagogue.

The Day After

It seems so quiet outside. I think even nature realizes that the debates, endless TV ads, ubiquitous polls and pundits are finally at rest. My husband taped Obama's victory speech for me and I watched it tonight after dinner. I thrilled to the resounding, "Yes we can!" by the thousands gathered to celebrate his election. Obama brings such hope to our bereft and compromised table.
I wish all of us shared this euphoria or even a little bit of the optimism. The election was not about race to me and to many in the region where I live. We stood in line together yesterday -- an extremely diverse group with the commonality of being able to vote; sharing the excitement in choosing a new president. We counted the minutes together, and laughed and talked about a new spirit, and that we were witnesses to -- no, participants -- in the making of history.
I'm not naive enough to think this happiness is universal as I know for a fact it is not. A friend who lives in a state in the Deep South told me she has never heard the "n word" (sorry, I can't even write it...) as much as she has in the past three days. I know about the South (not that racism is indigenous only to that part of the county), and about carpetbaggers, and lynchings, marches, and hatred that comes from destitution and injustice, but I thought that this was a part of our past, that we as a nation of immigrants (let's face it: how many of our ancestors were actually born here??) could finally look past color and we could begin to judge people 'not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.' And so my happiness and hope are tinged with a bit of sadness and disbelief that bigotry still exists.