I read much more slowly today than I did before my personal events of Feb, 2004. Then I suffered a head injury that caused me to spendseveral weeks in a silent coma, tetering between living and dying. And reduced my once amzing ability to read and remember severl books a week to a ploding- and- rereading- what- I- had- just- read- but- forgot- I- had- read pace. It has taken me most of these day and into the late evening after we have completed our social activites, Friday, Saturday and Sunday to read the 252 pages of Obama's masterpiece that I have read so far.
Many years ago, I read Ben Franklyn's autobiography. If our democracy endures the slaughter that this administration has performed on our nation's reputation, our economy, our standing the world of nations, even our military strength, our constitution, our national values, and if Obama can bring our country back from the brink of the garbage dump of failed empires, I think this book is ordained to become one of the world's masterpieces
I am 2/3s through Obama's first book, DREAMS FROM MY FATHER. It is without a doubt the most inspirational book I have ever read. I understand now what so many have found so special in this young president to be. I am not even finished with either of his two books, but I am an Obamanista.
Don't get me wrong. I think Hillary could have become a fine president. But I believe that Obama has both the opprotunity and the capacity to become a GREAT president. And reading his book has inspired me to break my "vow of silence." Well, at least as silent as I ever have been.
In the past few days my wife and I, sometimes with and without family, have been out in public much more than I have been in a long time. (Except for spending time with family and a very few very close friends, I have become somewhat reclusive.) Everywhere we have been, individuals, sometimes couples and more than a few small clusters of men and women I almost never recognize, have come up to our table, or to me and the friends gathered near, the tell me, us, how much they appreciate what I have done for the girls, women and families in our community and the larger community of our state. To tell my friends and family how much they admire them for what they have endured along with me. For many years now, I have tried to disabuse people who say this of the notion that I have endured anything in many years. (In fact, my life as an aging, indeed declining, grandfather would be pretty boring if all I had to look forward to in the morning was to go to work, do my job and come home, with no continuing social challenge to brighten my day.)
I think I might have been a little depressed by the xmas season and the tragedies we who work in my field of medicine all face every day in the lives of our patients and in the evening news.) But after reading BHO's amazing story of his life so far, and his struggle to become the
amazing person that he has become, I am awake to my ongoing responsibility to continue what I have been doing for the past 24 year: attempting to give words to the previously wordless, to speak for those too frightened to speak for themselves, and to continue to teach those who have not the experience and the knowledge to defend their own positions against the raging voices of the misinformed and the
passionately ignorant. So forget what I said about lurking and going home to spend more time with my grandchildren whom I love and adore.
I now realize that I can't remain even as semi-silent as I have been on the issue of reproductive health care because I know what their lives might become if people who feel as I do, and have the ability and knowledge to speak to the large community, remain silent and still and allow only those misinformed and ignorant voices, filled with the passion of the religious zealot, and the blind rage of the religious terrorist, who oppose everything I have worked for, stood for and provided all these years to once again dominate reproductive freedom conversation in my community.