Race and the President
I’m with Obama on this one, firmly and unequivocally. The recent spate of attention Obama has received on account of another person is nothing but pure, Grade A bullshit. We have a nasty little habit here in America of pinning blame on a person for the sins of another person. It has always irritated me and it is just as irritating now.
I’ve railed against Obama before, this some of you will know. But my rants against this candidate weren’t for the professed views and statements of another person. My ire with Obama lies solely in his personal actions, or inactions. The statements of his minister are of zero concern to me, as they should be to most of America.
His minister has strong views and is entitled to those views, under our Constitution. Obama is, and was just as entitled to attend that church and hear those same views. Does that imply guilt by association? I don’t believe it does. It quite obviously cannot imply any guilt where Obama is concerned; if he believed the strong statements professed by his former minister then I sincerely doubt Obama would ever have run for public office at all, let along the highest office in the land.
In his speech regarding this very issue I believe Obama handled race issues better than perhaps anyone in this nation’s short and bloody history. He voiced fears and concerns from all sides of the racial spectrum. He demonstrated a clear cut ability to identify problems not just on one side of the fence, but to find and acknowledge issues related to all people. This is not the voice of man who believes in the words of his pastor. This is the voice of man who is thoroughly tired of having to deal with race in America. And it isn’t because he is a black man; it is because he, like me, knows full well that in order to march into the future this nation is in desperate need of overcoming centuries worth of racial inequalities.
And to those of who would condemn him for not ‘disowning’ his former pastor: Fuck off.
His pastor might have been hasty in the choice of words, but from what I’ve heard, his pastor was dead right in his condemnation of American policy in several categories. If this makes me a disloyal, angry American then so be it. I’ll not hold my tongue when it comes to the sacred ground that is my fucking country. Simply because the vast majority of the public and most certainly our government prefers to skirt the important issues, pretending they aren’t there, doesn’t mean they aren’t there and doesn’t mean that we as a nation should allow these grievances to go unanswered.
Grow up America. The time for racial inequality to end has long since passed. We simply refuse to acknowledge it. The time of ignoring our many social problems has long passed us. The time of the self-serving, isolated individual is over, America, and you would do well to make your fucking peace with that, because the world will move on and you will be left behind. And so will America if we don’t remove our heads from our asses.
Link and out.