Me, my son and Obama: one father's story

[babylonsister]

Me, my son and Obama: one father's story

* Gary Younge
* The Guardian,
* Saturday November 1 2008



Barack Obama is greeted by supporters in Springfield, Illinois in February 2007 as he formally announces that he running for president
Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPA

snip//

I watched Obama accept the Democratic nomination with my mother-in-law, Janet, in a cinema on the southside of Chicago. Janet was raised in the South with the laws that put her at the back of the bus. As a teenager she went with her mother to see Martin Luther King speak in Philadelphia, listening in the overflow in the vestry because there were too many people in the church.

She was the one who first told me about Obama in 2003. She got involved in his primary campaign for the Senate when he didn't have a prayer, after she'd seen him on the local public channel, when he was a state senator. "He seemed like a bright guy," she says. "He reasoned his way through things and was always very impressive." She particularly liked his stance on the war. When he said he was running for Senate, she signed up as a volunteer.

And now, here we were just five years later seeing him clinch the deal in Denver on the big screen. At one point, when he recalled his anti-war speech in 2002, she punched my arm. "I was there." As she drove me to my hotel, she would occasionally say to no one in particular: "I just don't believe it."

Whether Osceola would ever be able to relate to what a momentous time this is for Janet remains to be seen. But her response made me think that the late comedian George Carlin was wrong. Symbols are too important to be left to the symbol-minded. By that time, my thinking on Obama had evolved. Not so much because of the man, but the moment. The atmosphere during this campaign has been unlike anything I've ever seen in a western country. To see so many people - particularly young people - engaged and hopeful about their political future after eight depressing years is inspiring. The last time I saw it was in South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994.

Walking down Sumter Street during Charleston's Martin Luther King day parade, watching white volunteers chant: "Obama '08! We're ready. Why wait?" gave political voice to an America I never doubted existed, but had yet to see. Among them was a young man who was "so depressed" after Obama's New Hampshire defeat that he had dropped everything he had been doing in Guatemala and flown back to help out. Local African Americans lined the sidewalks, cheering encouragement. Obama's victory in Iowa had proved that a black candidacy was not a pipe dream.

more...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/01/obama-race-black-americans-equality

[Mind_your_head]

1. Barack is a GREAT human being! Exemplery, in fact.

Being 0.5 black/ 0.5 white is in consequential in this case.

[Libertyfirst]

2. It is not inconsequential if you are are not white.

If you are not white this is an extraordinary hour. Have you not seen the pictures of the non-whites young people looking at Obama. This is proof, not that racism is dead, but that a non-white can make it to the very top. I think when this election is studied we will find that a majority of whites voted for him. As Obama says, this is a defining hour. That is true in a thousand ways, but after Tuesday every young black person in American can aspire, equally with every young white person, to become the president of the United States. I have always loved this land, but never more so than I will this coming tuesday night. Hope is the only indispensable ingredient for life.

And I am an elderly white man, born, reared and educated in the south whose ancestors fought on the right side in the revolutionary war and the wrong side in the civil war.

[Mind_your_head]

3. Hope, which brings promise for a better futrue

Thank you sir for your post.

btw, I'm a white woman of eastern european heritage whos ancesters only came here in the last 100 years or so b/c of desperate conditions in their own country at the time....

some of us came here 'voluntarily' (not really....desperation led us here) and others were DRAGGED/Kidnapped here......it is a noble thing to make the 'best' of what we've got, isn' it?

Peace,
M_Y_H

[Mind_your_head]

4. Late hour 'confessions'

can be truly "holy"

Peace,
M_Y_H