When Obama accepts the nomination...

it's been well publicized that tomorrow is the 45th anniversary of King's Dream Speech.

something else of note: on August 28, 1955, Emmett Till was taken from his family's home in Money, Mississippi and lynched by white men who would be acquitted and years later give magazine interviews confirming that they indeed brutally murdered the "uppity" Northern Negro - a fourteen-year-old boy with a stutter.

at that time, my mom was seven years old and the younger of her two brothers was only four months old. although the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka supreme court decision banning segregation in public schools had been handed down in May of the previous year, Rosa Parks was still three months and three days from her catalytic arrest for not surrendering her seat to a white man on a Montgomery public bus as still required by law.

my mother had to drink out of colored drinking fountains and sit on the back of the bus when she and her parents would travel from California to visit their family in Memphis.

tomorrow, my mother will be a sixty-year-old woman watching an EXCELLENT man (who happens to be Black) accept the Democratic nomination for president. her baby brother is now an ecstatic grandfather who will be able to teach his young granddaughter as demonstrated fact, not just hope, that she can grow up and be truly be absolutely ANYthing she wants to be in America.

what a joyous moment. i've been crying good, happy tears.
there's more to say but isn't there always?

much love and light to ya!

i was just thinking.........and after reading this posting, some of you may believe that my opinions generated from the opposite end of my anatomy............

.......at his funeral, Henry Kissinger said of Nixon, "just imagine who he would have been if somebody had actually loved him" during his formative years.

the way things are shaping up in this general election cycle, i was just thinking....... if you took a moment, would you be willing to consider - at least in the very, very abstract - the strong possibility that Obama will be like Nixon BUT-BUT-BUT -- with empathy and a conscience?

(gasp!)

i say this in the most positive way. i mean, if we look back and compare Obama's early unpopular willingness to compromise on certain positions like speaking to leaders of nations with whom we have adversarial relationships, his forward-thinking on things like the war in Iraq (not gonna award him a MacArthur Genius grant for that, but still), and his troubling, stomach-churning support for the civil rights-goosing FISA bill, could there be at least a diffused resemblance to nixon and some of his maneuvering, most notably in comparison to nixon's travel to China?

if the technology were available, **here's** where i'd post a barfbag for those of you who need it now.

we've seen hints of Obama's politician's knack for prevarication and mendacity, although he tends to use his powers for good. i say this as an Obama supporter, through and through. "i was never in the church when Rev. Wright made those types of comments" and "i am not a crook."??? different trees, same yard. i'm just sayin'.

on a certain level, were one to be very, very lacking in generosity, could one reasonably compare Obama's speech on race to The Checkers Speech? after all, they were both important speeches delivered at crucial points in the political careers of both men. both speeches evoked the desired level of sympathy, both were disarming enough to gain both men support they needed to get them out of messy binds. i'm only half kidding here.

but seriously: nixon once said that he saw his job as president to be mainly about foreign policy and overall strengthening of the US' viability as a world power, and that Congress' role was to handle domestic issues, in that congressional representatives are closer to the pulse of We the People.

according to nixon, if a bill got through congress, apparently it was the will of the people for it to pass, so he did not always see it as his job to block that will.

for all of his many, many, many flaws, prejudices, character defects and executive orders, two things are true of richard nixon: 1) more civil rights legislation passed during his presidency than either jfk or lbj, including the famous Title IX which gave aspiring female school athletes equal access to activities as their male counterparts (my baby cousin played flag football thanks to legislation like that -- and SMOKED all the boys on the field, i might add), and 2) up until the time of his death, Nixon was called upon - discreetly, much to his consternation - by every single president besides Jimmy Carter for advice on foreign policy issues.

i am not defending nixon or lionizing him at all. i'm just saying that perhaps kissinger's eulogy of nixon - a man with whom he worked and accomplished much, despite being a Jewish man working closely with a known anti-Semite - is worth considering.

Nixon, Bush II, and Obama all had their daddy issues, although Obama has done the best of them by lightsaber years.

still, during a sever thunderstorm during the wee this morning, the strangest thought came to me: perhaps Bush II is Darth Vader, and Obama is Anakin Skywalker?

men do the best they can with the resources and insight they have at the time. with the amount of love, faith and empathy they feel inside for people who are like them, and for people who are different from them. perhaps if it had been Bush whose mother got up early in the morning to go over his lessons with him, Bush II who could have had the intelligence to match the bravado, Bush II who had grown up in such culturally-rich but sometimes manifestly underprivileged conditions, things would be markedly, joyfully different for our country right now.

predestination philsophy would suggest that Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker created and needed each other.

just a thought.

this morning i meditated on my inner child. no, not the child inside me that i used to be, but the child that i hope to have one day soon, who for the time being, still is me.

here's what she helped me realize:

i wish we could all stop speaking in unrealistic, absurd hypotheticals and ego-driven assertions and really get to who is best prepared to protect AND PROGRESS our nation's fallen standing in the world.

instead of Straw Man Gas Tax Holidays, i wish that fewer of us would take a holiday from common sense when such common sense contradicts our egos' needs.

i wish we could really reallly discuss more things like the falling levels of education, the rising high-school dropout rate among our youth and compare that to the disproportionate numbers of our citizens in our nation's jails. we might see a solution that would end the trend of  our growing inability to compete with poor but proud kids from places like india.

we would also see how much attention Hillary's pantsuits and American Idol truly warrant.

i wish that Terry McAuliffe would start some trendy new diet and exercise program or become a college basketball coach, or at least have Rain Man teach him to do proper mathematical -- not political -- calculations.

i wish we didn't care so much about lapel pins and that we cared more about the pinned-in, those receiving ANTIsocial INsecurity while the Europeans and the Japanese receive more in exchange for their tax dollars than we do, pension scandals notwithstanding.

i wish someone could explain to hillary that we really really do appreciate her desire to make health care universal, but that such ideas existed before 1992, and such ideas can come into fruition without her. she has at some point in this cycle offended, insulted, or just plain ignored (hello my asian brothers and sisters!) every single subgroup in our country, all under the notion that she's doing this to take care of us. please rescue her from the megalomaniacal theory that she must rescue all of us. herself. please talk her in from the cold.

just don't bring her to my house.

i wish we could figure out a way to talk to cuba that didn't just keep the interests of the privileged exiles front and foremost, but that somehow led us on an enlightened discourse to learn how they accomplish such good health care, such inexpensive medication, and such excellent doctors even without the assistance of the united states.

i wish i could get the email addresses of some of the really cool jews i see posting comments in the cybersphere about progressive ways for Israel to dialogue with its adversaries in the middle east. an adversary is just someone who opposes you, like in a tennis match or a dungeons and dragons tournament...an enemy is something different....and i wish my Jewish/Palestinian/Muslim brothers and sisters could tell me exactly how i could help them in the struggle to live peacefully. i really do.

that said, i wish we in the U.S. could figure out how to have enough adversaries to keep us strong, defined, and walking in the Light without so many enemies constantly out to utterly destroy us -- and i wish we could be a better adversary to those with whom we are fundamentally at odds.

i wish we could find a way to disagree and still make each other stronger. but maybe that's just me.

i wish that i could stop seeing comment posts from people who say "i'm a 36 year old white woman and a working mother of two, and OMG sexism is SO MUCH worse than racism".

i am a black woman. so will my daughter(s) be, whether i wind up with the Hot Swiss Guy or with the Righteous Black Brother who's my cousin's work colleague. there are many places i could go with this, but the bottom line is that racism and sexism both suck noodles. I WISH these women who are so quick to compare and contrast could at acknowledge that there is an existential distinction between the female progeny of a people who once were slaves and the female progeny of those who enslaved them.

i say this not as a crutch or to beg anyone to understand or validate what i feel and what i know about my experience. it does not negate the love and camaraderie i sincerely feel with many of my sisters from other ethnic backgrounds, but the blanket comparisons PLUS Geraldine Ferraro PLUS Hillary Clinton's assertion that there has been no racism in this campaign -- YEESH!

if i don't laugh i'll cry, and I WISH somebody White besides my Dutch girlfriends and my favorite auntie understood THAT.

i wish that more people would realize that the Democratic Party has received only about 40% of the so-called Reagan Democrats (working-class white men) since the civil rights era (hmmm), including bill clinton, who won the election twice, and black people voted for him in the largest proportions of any other ethnic demographic. twice.

therefore, i wish the MSM would please pump their brakes on the argument that the white men who voted against obama for hillary this time around in a primary are racist enough to do so, but still not so sexist (in those pockets of Kentucky ) that they'll let the GIRL retain their vote against a white male war hero in a general election.

i wish folks would please remember that as much as democrats and democratic-leaning independents have a distaste for her, the republicans will treat mccain like BraveHeart going to the battlefield come november if Hillary Clinton is the nominee. and just acknowledge it, mourn it, and then come together ENOUGH to all punch obama in the ballot (pun intended) this november.

i wish that more people would come forward to really ask hillary and bill to explain why they did not seem to have any problem with the rules when bill won twice, and when hillary looked inevitable.

finally, i wish that people could just read this post and breathe for a minute, without complaining or asserting their tortured, torturous and TORTUOUS points of view in the comments section...take a break from the drama -- stretch, relax and release, 'cause i'mma do me and y'all should do you.

as best as we all can, Do.

luv&hugz,
mE.

let's put it out there i'm an african-american female (although i prefer Basic Black Gurl) and i'm for Obama.

those of you with ears, an intelligence quotient higher than that of a goose and a resting heart rate below 187 should not find that particularly jarring.

Shrillarites, please depart now.

thank you.

now, it is increasingly nonsensical and disheartening to me the scores of people who are appalled by the idea of Jeremiah Wright's alleged notion that the AIDS virus could have been engineered to decimate the Black community.

have none of you heard of the Tuskegee Experiment?

i've copy-pasted the gist for you below (emphases mine):

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The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male[1] also known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Pelkola Syphilis Study, Public Health Service Syphilis Study or the Tuskegee Experiments was a clinical study, conducted [from] 1932 to 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, in which 399 (plus 201 control group without syphilis) poor — and mostly illiterate — African American sharecroppers were denied treatment for Syphilis.

This study became notorious because it was conducted without due care to its subjects, and led to major changes in how patients are protected in clinical studies. Individuals enrolled in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study did not give informed consent and were not informed of their diagnosis; instead they were told they had "bad blood" and could receive free medical treatment, rides to the clinic, meals and burial insurance in case of death in return for participating.[2]

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this is how certain people in the Black community find it remotely possible that AIDS could have been set up by the government as well -- after all the Public Health Service, the predecessor of the CDC -- was in full knowledge and support of the so-called experiment, a 40-year example of human sadism and depravity befitting only Dr. Mengele and his Nazi war crimes.