For many, this will be their last election. I’m talking about the over 70 segment of our population, the so-called "greatest generation." These are the people who fought heroically in WWII and Korea. These are the ones who came home from the wars and gave their hearts and souls into building an America that would be recognized as the world leader in productivity and ingenuity. The significance of their contributions cannot be overstated. They harnessed nuclear energy. They took us to the moon.
But they also hated black people
They were born and raised in a culture that insisted those who looked different were different. Since they were the vast majority in their own land, they assumed the mantle of superiority, and there was no one to dispute their claim. Epithets like Dago, Mick, Spook, Spick, Kraut, Chink were part of their daily vocabulary. They didn’t see anything wrong with those words, and they fell easily off their tongues.
If you were born in the 1920’s or 1930’s, discrimination was a fact of life. Whites were better than everyone else. Some whites, like the Irish were not quite as good, but they were still better than people with slightly darker skin like Mexicans, or people with slanty eyes, like Orientals. And although looked down upon, the "slightly" colored people were clearly much better than dark-skinned folks - the "n" people.
For decades they fought, and worked, and even lived side-by-side with the "other people." They even had friends among them. When the 1960’s came and the Civil Rights Movement began, they had to pick a side. Although some of them were much harder to convince than other, eventually most of them chose to be on the side of equality. But the equality they accepted was equality on their own terms. You can sit next to me at the lunch counter and drink out of the same water fountain, but you can’t date my daughter.
This generation will never be able to completely come to grips with the fact that everything they were taught or thought they knew about the equality of human beings was wrong. The intolerances of the world they grew up in are too much a part of who they are. That is why many of them will not vote for Barack Obama. They can’t help themselves – they just can’t elect a Black man.
I remember that we had to warn my father-in-law if he kept using the "n" word in the presence of his grandchildren, we would not bring them over any more. That was in the 1980’s – 20 years after the Civil Rights Act became law. Last week, this spry man of 82 cheerfully filled out his absentee ballot for John McCain, not because he believes McCain will be a good President, but because the other choice simply goes against his grain.
But he and the many others like him are disappearing. It’s sad that we are losing the members of the "greatest generation" to the inevitability of old age and death. But along with their passing is the extinction of their belief system, their in-bred distrust of people who do not look just like them.
The generation that came after, the people my age, still harbor plenty of racist views, especially in certain geographic areas. But they are just perspectives, not a fact of life, as in our parents’ days. Our children were raised in a much more tolerant world, even though their parents’ might not have agreed with how the world was changing.
And our children’s children, the ones I see walking the halls at school, and hanging with their "buds" of all colors and creeds, will bring the world even closer to racial harmony. I wonder if they will ask, when they reach voting age, "What was the big deal about electing a multi-racial President back in 2008?" Because they will always have known that any man or any woman or any color had an equal chance to be the leader of our country.