Oh come on. Are you really that ignorant? Are you so dumb to think that the color of someone else’s skin determines the kind of person they are? That a man who had little money but a lot of talent, who was able to compose the American dream and succeed at it despite the roadblocks he faced, is someone you can’t vote for because of the color of their skin?

I’m not completely out of my mind, not yet at least. I recognize racism is alive and well in America and that 235 years of this nonsense isn’t going to go away especially now that a man of mixed race seeks the presidency of the United States. People in rural areas, in general, are deathly afraid that Barack Obama could be our next chief executive. Why? Is he stupid? Is he going to lock white people up in slave camps? Is he too liberal?

And just what does liberal mean? My definition is that a liberal is anyone, of any color or any sex who does not agree with what conservatives have to say about life and how to live it. Only liberals would criticize a man like john McCain who spent seven years in a prisoner of war destination resort in North Vietnam. Only a liberal would question McCain’s competence to be president.
To conservatives, McCain’s days spent caged in an overheated bunker in the jungle more than qualifies him to be above criticism and political review and therefore gives him ready access to run the country, even though he has no idea how many homes his wife owns. Even though he cheated on his first wife the day he hit the ground running and shacked up with a stone faced heiress fully equipped with an accessible bank balance. Even though he sometimes has no idea what he’s said, or where he is, or how he stumbles through words others have written for him. Even though his lies are boxed in warehouses, unsealed documents, and are available for public access, no one pokes into his integrity.

But they would if his skin color was darker. They’d contend his days of a prisoner of war made him too much of a spooked psycho to even get near the Oval office, much less sit in it. And why does military experience mean so much to people when some of our best presidents never served at all? Even the conservative God Ronald Reagan only play acted at being a soldier, just as George W. Bush did. Clinton didn’t serve and his economic policies didn’t suffer. Franklin Roosevelt yanked the country up by its infrastructure and out from under a global depression even as corporate America fought him every inch of the way.

But now it’s the shade of a man’s skin not his accomplishments that count. Sounds like nothing’s changed doesn’t it? Maybe it hasn’t? And for that, 21st century America seems doomed to repeat the same dumb ass moves that’s killed every other national dream of unity and success and driven those nations that have done that into misery, stupidity, and historical oblivion.

We haven’t got much time left. Make the most of it before it’s all gone. Before darker times ahead make us look back at the dark man who could have made a difference in our ability to survive the impending threat of our national ignorance

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 8:11 am and is filed under Stuff I know. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.