OK, 98% pleased
After many poverty-stricken years as an historian, I know that there are--to use the pundits' newly-discovered phrase--"transformational moments" in American history. Usually they happen because a critical mass of a frequently thick electorate arrive at a moment of unconscious gestalt, then drag the leadership after them.
The gestalt isn't uniform. We have the moving sight on one hand of some of the most powerful black people in America weeping to see a sight none of their ancestors dared dream of...a moment some of them must have often doubted. I don't think it is quite possible to be white and to fully comprehend an Obama victory.
Yet we still have the march of bigotry drumming on in a new theatre...still have the tired dogma of omniphobes denying civil rights to people based not upon their race, but upon who they love. These people are running out of targets for their rage. They may at last have to turn their attention to the mirror.
Proposition 8 is a fly in my soup. Like flies, homophobic bigotry is germy and hard to swat.
Once again, I wish life were like baseball. Massachusetts could trade its anti-gay and anti-tax cliques to California for an equal number of talented, energetic GLBT people, to take up some of the slack in our declining population. We'd come out ahead, and it wouldn't do more than delay the inevitable outcome in California.
The gestalt isn't uniform. We have the moving sight on one hand of some of the most powerful black people in America weeping to see a sight none of their ancestors dared dream of...a moment some of them must have often doubted. I don't think it is quite possible to be white and to fully comprehend an Obama victory.
Yet we still have the march of bigotry drumming on in a new theatre...still have the tired dogma of omniphobes denying civil rights to people based not upon their race, but upon who they love. These people are running out of targets for their rage. They may at last have to turn their attention to the mirror.
Proposition 8 is a fly in my soup. Like flies, homophobic bigotry is germy and hard to swat.
Once again, I wish life were like baseball. Massachusetts could trade its anti-gay and anti-tax cliques to California for an equal number of talented, energetic GLBT people, to take up some of the slack in our declining population. We'd come out ahead, and it wouldn't do more than delay the inevitable outcome in California.
posted by Uncle | 00:16
2 Comments:
No, I don't think whites can fully understand what Obama's victory means. But...we can to some extent, and I was crying right along with Jesse and Oprah. Thinking on the footage I have seen of blacks being knocked down by fire hoses, being told to sit somewhere else because of their skin color, of millions of people marching in protest because they dared to stand up and say "This is NOT right, and we are NOT going to be treated this way anymore" and...they changed peoples minds with their stance.
Pardon me while I feel a small bit of pride for my country...for a few minutes. Its been a long time.
I like the phrase one black guy quoted to a reporter: "Rosa sat, so that Martin could walk, so that Barack could run."
I had a minister who was knocked down by those Selma fire hoses...he did not live to see this, and I wish he had.
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