Let me show you what’s in my mind about this race.
I was brought up by very loving parents in a family where I also had a younger brother and a scrappy little dog called Jeep.
When we lived in Arkansas, we were enrolled in a school called Stephen’s Elementary. This school was special to me in a way that it had a diverse bunch of people in it and also had the best teachers I ever had in my life.
When I look at this class picture so many years later I can see in our faces what hope we all had for our lives and for the future. I knew our teacher was so proud of us because I saw it in her eyes every day. We as students, being young enough for the most part, did not see our visual differences as anything more than some people would view a difference in hair color.
My family was very much for integration and were protestors for the cause way back when. They believe in equal rights for women. They believed in family and faith.
These are the moral values my parents and most specifically my Mother insisted on instilling us with. It wasn’t taught by lessons, or doctrine, only exposure. I never asked, but I assumed we could have all gone to separate schools. We could all be shielded from differences and no risks of conflict would ever rear their ugly head.
Being 39 years of age and having been through many stages of life in our society I look back and find it hard to understand why we failed to connect with each-other. So enormous is that disconnect that we still have racial steering, the right cannot talk to the left, and the evangelicals and secularists seem to have an irreconcilable animosity. It frustrated me, because somehow I thought if we were that far along in my little class, surely racism and other ‘isms’ would be gone by now. Surely we would have progressed and conquered these things.
As you can probably guess by now I am talking about race where it pertains to Barack, my own personal history and the Presidency. Believe me, it is not the primary issue to having an intelligent and solid leader in the White House. However, once I had decided on who I was voting for in the primary and realized that this would be the first black President I saw it in context of my own life history. Its secondary effects are relevant as they are relevant to me and many others. Its not just about black and white, but when you realize that to heal this country you have to reach out to different and diverse groups, and when you do all our lives get better. Our Country was based on that when they infused freedom of religion and speech into the Constitution.
The way I am starting to realize it, is that we must have a President that is going to make good on the promises we started with our Constitution up to integration and communication with the people we disagree with today. When I heard Barack say that we could meet eye to eye with people who were against abortion and make a goal of reducing it greatly as long as they can accept family planning and birth control, I knew this person really knew where the problems live. I know it will be hard because everybody wants more and thinks they are right. However, I know we can do it. Even in America marriages are saved when the work is put into the relationship. The way this country gets along is like a marriage; like a relationship; and it IS a FAMILY. That is the family we need to save. We will claim family values and they will claim it, so we can all have it.
Barack Obama is the person we should put in the White House to do the job of President of the United States of America. He is experienced, educated, principled and thoughtful. He is a leader. He can look forward to the future but also looks back to where he came from and always extends a helping hand. He knows where minority and women’s rights came from and knows how to continue that path of progress in a true fashion. This is why I believe in his candidacy.
There’s me. I later went on to study Music and then go to school for Computer Science. I recently got my graduate degree and am working in a full time job... and like most of you, working for that future that we are always hoping to see....