A New Day in America, or the same old same old?

I hate writing posts like this...I really do...

"Let these bastards get in...I don't give a damn anymore." That beauty comes from Roberta McCain, John McCain's mother. My immediate response, which should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, is... well, those of you who know me can well imagine the expletive-laced epithet that immediately comes to mind...but I've been told my gutter mouth leads people to not listen to the message... Let's put it this way...I hope that Roberta McCain doesn't need anything from the Obama administration...if she's collecting Social Security or a military pension, perhaps she should express her outrage and moral superiority by giving it back... amazing the sense of entitlement that some people have...

Here's another beauty from a business associate of mine, from his facebook page: "What a truly, truly sad day in American history!!! When we put financial hope and superficial emotion over moral standards and right & wrong!!!" Dude...moral standards like...sending nearly 5,000 young American kids to their deaths in Iraq for a war which was justified with lies? Moral standards like calling Obama a terrorist, a traitor, and screaming that he should be killed? Moral standards like letting unused embryos be discarded in the trash, rather than using them for stem cell research, which might actually prolong life and find cures for diseases like Parkinson's and spinal cord injuries which otherwise shorten life? Those kinds of moral standards? I cannot believe the arrogance...

But, I don't even really need to look far from home...my own brother-in-law sent me and his sister an email in which he asserts that Obama won because 95% of blacks (he won't call them African Americans) voted for him, (and here's the good part) and that's just racist! Pity is, I know how he was raised...and it saddens me that he is such a bigot...for no reason...my in-laws are lifelong Republicans, but decent, good people...I don't know what happened with their son.

I wrote in a previous post that I was heartbroken at the level to which political discourse had sunk in this country. I fear that I was wrong...it wasn't about political discourse. If only it were that trivial. Instead, I fear that we have come no farther in my lifetime than where we were when I was a child, divided as a society, suspicious of one another because of our skin color, or the shape of our nose, or because some speak with an accent...I thought that we had become more enlightened...

I've heard many a news reader or commentator or political analyst remark that we elected Obama because we had finally transcended race as a people...not hardly, I think...oh yes, some of us did...perhaps a great many of us. Yes, it's true that he got 61% of the "white" vote...and yet...

Can we imagine that Bill Clinton or John Kerry or John Edwards or hell, Joe Biden, would have been called a "terrorist"... a "socialist" ... a "traitor"? Yes, it's true that Kerry was savaged over his service to his country in Viet Nam. I supposed it is OK to question him if you, too were there, and didn't come back and criticize your country. But, isn't even questioned service more honorable than service avoided? Yes, I'm talking about you, W, and you, Cheney, and you Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Rove and the rest who lied us into Iraq...who never having served in a war...never having seen its horrors firsthand, thought nothing of sending our sons and daughters to die in one? But even at the height of the indignation over Bill Clinton's lascivious behavior, nobody ever called him unpatriotic, or a terrorist, or a traitor. Why Obama and not Clinton? Or Kerry? When you can't call someone a "nigger" anymore, what do you call him? A traitor, a terrorist, a socialist... You try to make people believe that he's dangerous...that terrible things will happen if he's elected. I was happy to hear Colin Powell be the first to say, about people calling Obama a Muslim...so what if he was? Why, in a country founded on religious freedom would we not be accepting of a Muslim president?

But wait... why is Obama a "black" man? His mother was "white"...are we still back in the days of the late 1800s when the so-called "one-drop rule" came into being? The rule held that if you had just one drop of non-white blood, then you were not white. Madison Grant of Virginia in The Passing of the Great Race wrote: "The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew." (Interestingly enough, the "one-drop rule" wasn't declared unconstitutional until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed Virginia's inter-racial marriage ban in Loving v. Virginia.) If we considered Obama to be "white" would we have called him all these names?

What if none of this "below the surface" racism were there...what about those who labeled him as an elitist? It blows my mind that we are suspicious of smart people...think about that for a minute, why don't you? My dad is retired now. He was a schoolteacher, on the secondary level, taught foreign languages, science, math, and English. It used to happen to him, probably once a year, that during parent-teacher conferences, a parent would say to him "You're so smart! Why are you teaching here?" My dad would respond, incredulously, "Would you have an idiot teaching your children?"

One would think that we would want only the smartest among us as our leader. One would think that after eight long years of the "C-" president, we would hunt, desperately, for intellectuals to lift us up...to tackle the difficult problems that the current holder of the office has led us into. Instead, we got the hillbilly from Wasilla. The lipstick on a pig analogy was oh so appropriate...this non-intellectual journalism major who can't name a single newspaper that she reads, who had the audacity to claim that she had foreign policy experience because she can see Russia from her house...oh my god...

I am thrilled beyond my ability to describe it that Barack Hussein Obama will be our next president. As Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg put it, she had been waiting all of her life for someone to inspire her the way that people told her that her father had inspired them. He is certainly inspirational. He is eloquent. He paints broad pictures of big ideas. No president in my lifetime, since JFK, has done that. Will he succeed at everything he touches? Probably not. But I do believe that he will reach for grand things. Will he be my generation's JFK? Or given the current situation in the world, our FDR?

It is dangerous to invest too many hopes and dreams in one man (or woman). Yet, for the first time in my lifetime, I feel hopeful, and I dare to dream of a country so much better than it is today. Time will tell...