I had an exchange with a gentleman that struck me profoundly. It made me realize in the most stark terms that there are some people in this country who will NEVER appreciate anything about Barack Obama, no matter how bi-partisan or unabashedly correct it happens to be.
I know that there are a lot of people in this country who are filled with mis-information and hatred (for lack of a better word) for the President, but when you hear it coming from an actual person's mouth, a person right in front of you rather than on a TV screen or a YouTube video, it moves from the realm of The Internets and your personal sphere. You react differently to something like that.
My daughter wants to become more proficient in tennis. We've got her in some group lessons but they don't seem to be doing much, so we're looking into some private sessions with a coach.
We met a gentleman who comes highly recommended, and when we saw him in action with another girl our daughter's age we were impressed. We had been out with my daughter hunting around for some public courts where she and my husband could hit some balls, and ran into this gentleman on the courts in our neighborhood, where you need a key to access the courts.
After some quick chit-chat, my husband happened to mention that we couldn't find any public courts in the area. Every single one was locked up. My husband is from California and grew up playing tennis on public courts. There are a lot of them in sunny California.
The coach said, "Yeah, well that's what you get with Obama trying to socialize everything."
I was so stunned at what he had said that it took a moment to sink in. What on earth can you say to a statement like that?
First off, this tennis coach seems to think that Obama personally had a hand in the past three and a half years in removing tennis courts from public access. I don't remember that in any campaign promises, but he appears to have taken it on as a pet project.
Second of all, what on EARTH does socialism have to do with locking up tennis courts? If he wanted to socialize everything, wouldn't he force all the tennis courts in the land to be open to the people?
Part of the reason I was taken aback by this statement was this gentleman's demographics, as well. He is an older (60's) Mexican American. I don't normally count them in the wing nut crowd.
This is what this nation is faced with. An electorate that puts every conceivable inconvenience and wrong-headed thing squarely in the court (the locked up tennis court, apparently) of the President.
Add that to the fact that they have little to no understanding of the terms they use when criticizing him, and monsterously subvert them to their own twisted usage, and we have a better understanding of what Barack Obama is up against in this election.
I am so thankful that people like this seem to be in the minority in this country, if the polls are any indication. But Obama will never win these people over. I don't care if he ran on the wingnuttiest platform of small government and social regression known to mankind.
You can't win over a person who is divorced from reality.
Oh, and by the way, this is one or two neighborhoods over from the other elderly gentleman who hung a folding chair up in his tree, garnering national attention.