What a monumental moment for America
I am truly amazed and pleased by the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States of America. It is a monumental feat and a possible signal that we as a people have moved beyond racial schism in America. I am not naive enough to think that racism doesn't exist or that there is not a rising tide of xenophobia-an ugly form of racism among Americans that lingers and will perdure. However what Obama has accomplished is a huge step in recognizing that in America truly all men are created equal. As a young man growing up in Florida I would never have thought that this would be possible.
During the early to mid nineteen fifties I was in junior high and high school. There were no blacks in my school nor any other school in Tampa Florida. The blacks had their own school and we didn't even play them in school sports. There were separate bathrooms and drinking fountains with white only signs in public places. Blacks were not allowed in white restaurants or white hotels. They could only ride in the back of buses. For us, as young teenagers, it's as if black people never existed. As a matter of fact I heard at the time ( I have no personal knowledge of this) that some of my classmates used to go to the black sections of town and bait the blacks and even beat them up. As a transplanted northener I was shocked at this revelation and wondered why in the world they would do this. Even at that young age I couldn't understand how one human being could treat another so badly without even knowing them especially when the blacks never provoked such actions.
I lived through all that and then the Supreme Court Decision of Brown vs. Board of Education determined that the doctrine of "separate but equal" as decided in Plessy vs. Ferguson years earlier, was unconstitutional. This decision fomented riots, and along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandating social changes in the south, gave impetus to the social revolution and Martin Luther King. Black revolutionary groups sprung up and leaders like Malcolm X, Edgar Mevers and King himself were assassinated. When Robert Kennedy, who espoused liberal causes and wanted to further black progress, was assassinated,it put an exclamation point on this whole paradigm.
As the years progressed the situation for blacks slowly improved. They were able to get better educations and better jobs. They were populating and even dominating college and professional sports. They were able to seek public office at local and state levels and eventually in the Federal Congress. All of the public injustices that I had witnessed as a young man had been eliminated but the public was slow to accept these changes and it turned out that the new generation of blacks and whites were the ones who began to see each other as individuals and became more accepting of one another. Each generation since then has become more tolerant and more inclusive in their relations with other races as integration took hold and became part of the fabric of our nation.
So it is that young, attractive, articulate and intelligent Barack Obama stepped on to the national stage at a time when our country turned on its constitutional roots and mandates and began to drift from the America that had always been the beacon of hope and freedom in the world. The United States had always evoked both love and hatred toward her but never lack of respect. We always had been a country of principle and stuck to those principles no matter what happened.
Then George Bush and 9/11 came along and everything was thrown into the ash can. Individual rights and habeus corpus, respect for the rule of law, time honored restraints on the way we treated prisoners of war, regard for rights of privacy, all thrown out the window for the expediency of the moment. However the biggest blunder and one which eventually sunk the republican ship was the doctrine of preemptive war. This doctrine has never been accepted in America and when George Bush and Dick Cheney jammed this absurd notion down the throats of a fearful public and a weak and defenseless Congress, we were on a one way road to destruction and Osama Bin Laden had accomplished a victory over the hearts and minds of the American people and its blundering public guardians that he could never have imagined in his wildest dreams. With those fatal actions and decisions wholly supported by a republican congress, we, as a nation, began the spiral down into the gutter and acted more like the people we were fighting against rather than taking the high ground and using our power and influence to punish the perpetrators of 9/11 through our world partners and international organizations. After these events and the attack on Saddam Hussein and Iraq many people, including this writer, determined that Republicans had forever forfeited their right to hold the highest office in the land and have their hand anywhere near the nuclear trigger.
Along with a message of hope and change which embodied without further embellishment all of the failures and missed opportunities of the Bush administration, Obama focused our vision on a different America, a different way of governing, a different way of confronting our foes and a different way of utilizing our position of power to better the plight of the poor, exploited and ignored in the rest of the world. I hope with all of my heart that he succeeds. He has a steep path to climb but he has already climbed a steeper path to gain the Presidency. Congratulations, Mr. President!!!