This week my people--hicks, hillbillies, white trash, rednecks, and crackers--have a chance to make history. We can save our lives and the lives of our children and unborn generations of Americans.
We can start to rebuild our economy and create a stronger military that will be able to protect us at home and around the world when necessary. We can repair damages to parts of the country hit by natural disasters. We can spend more money on our children, and see to it that they receive the kind of education and medical care that currently only rich people can afford.
How do we achieve this? My friends, all of you who are routinely shunned by liberals and universally mocked by media regardless of its affiliations, YOU can help sway this election by voting for Barack Obama and thereby telling Washington that you are fed up and will not take it any more.
Today I received this message from my sister, whose family has been hit hard by the past eight years of the Bush Administration:
"We enrolled [the boys] in public school this year because we just can't afford tuition...
I finally put our house on the market this summer, but real estate is so bad right now, prices down so low, we are taking it off until spring or summer of next year. We also listed the property, but no sale yet.
[My husband] took the in-house job offer at the plant and we had to take about a 35% pay cut, but at least we have benefits. We're still adjusting financially to the trauma, but our faith will carry us through.
The election is finally around the corner and wow, what a ride. We have carefully digested both sides, watched the debates, considered everyone's input and have decided that our votes will be for McCain/Palin. We just can't support a person who is for abortion, partial birth abortion, same sex marriage, keeps changing their own figures of who will/won't get tax breaks or increases. The looming question of Obama's ties to Muslims who have terrorized our country and his unwillingness to wear the American flag lapel pin or hold his hand over his heart during our National Anthem are a few of our thorns. At any rate, everyone will vote according to their own hearts and we respect that."
My sister is a proud and loving person, but she has been misguided by the messages drifting through organizations to which she belongs. She has been misled and cheated of her birthright as an American. She is so cowed by the rich people running this country, she is about to vote to give them ANOTHER chance to kick her and her family in the dirt.
I say: ENOUGH.
My parents grew up poor in a small town in rural Georgia during the Depression. All of their lives, they did NOT shun black people or trash the Democratic Party. They told me that their families would not have survived, in fact would have starved to death, if not for the social programs created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Those programs got their families working again, and put food on their tables and money in their pockets. My parents' families put their faith in an educated man with big ideas who truly cared about them, and he raised them up out of poverty.
Tomorrow we can make history. We can elect the first African-American president and we can make it clear at the same time that we are not going to take abuse from the wealthy one percent, or from politicians who take bribes and hire their rich cronies and mock us with their fake down-home accents and their secret contempt for us. We will not be conned into thinking that lapel pins are more important than being able to feed our children or give them a good education. We will not be conned into thinking that a brave man with deep rooted Christian beliefs is somehow related to terrorists, or that the Muslim faith in itself is something to be feared. We will not be the tools of this shameless government.
So I call on my people, and we are not at all embarrassed to call ourselves hicks, we wear that tag proudly: STAND UP and tell the Bush Administration and its new candidate where to get off. Vote for Obama. Vote for all of US.