I feel now like I was hit by a truck. Ending the Obama presidency with a Congress worse
than any other obstructionist one since the Civil War is beyond my ability to comprehend
and therefore successfully write anything in exegesis of it. How does one explain the massive electoral
myocardial infarction that happened one week ago and make sense of it? How rational is it for a nation to usher into
office the same Party that obstructed the President at every turn insulting him, shut the
government down and refused to raise the debt ceiling? The refusal to raise the debt ceiling alone
would have sent this nation and the world into a gran mal economic seizure.
The difference between the 2008, 2012 elections when
the president was swept into office and the midterms of 2010 and 2014 when he was
not on the ballot is that persons of color including Hispanics and the
Democratic base sat the election out.
2/3rds who were registered to vote in 2014 did not do so. It was the lowest voter turnout in decades. Democrats win when voters vote. The majority of the electorate is on the side
of the 98% and not the side of the 1% millionaires and billionaires but if the
98% do not vote they are not counted.
Perhaps, they sat it out, too, because of unconstitutional
Republicon Jim Crow-like tricks requiring certain difficult-to-obtain and costly IDs needed
to vote or perhaps they sat it out because, clearly, we live in two different
Americas -- a racist half and the other half.
Moreover, Obama cannot be elected anymore. Or perhaps it was the fact that Democrats
like Alison Lundergan Grimes, who gave that chinless McConnell beast a bit of a
scare, thought it better to run away from the many successes of the president
and simply not answer the question posed to her: "Did you vote for
President Obama?" She SHOULD have
said a resounding YES and then screamed out the differences, the wide
differences, between a Democrat and a Republicon of this era. She should have stood tall and proud that she
is a Democrat instead of denying it and not answering the obvious.
After the president's rise to the presidency I thought
all that hard work, all the freedom rides, all the marches against segregation,
all the voter registration and Supreme Court decisions paid off and that all
the bombings of black churches, all the racist killings, all the segregation
and all of the strange fruit hanging from the Poplar Trees were made right. I thought the wrongs of a nation were addressed and in
the process made the arc of the universe, indeed, bend toward justice and not
away from it. I am not so sure anymore
that the arc of justice has not retreated and bent the other way. My heart is
broken and I weep. I hope someday in my
lifetime I will see a land that does not deliver "a bad check marked
insufficient funds" as MLK said it had.
Race has been the albatross around the necks of our national
historical experience from its beginning.
The president to me looks sad, he looks lonely and he waxes baffled by a
Republicon Party that should have been relegated to the ash bin of our history a
long time ago. But it has not been
relegated to the ash bin of our history.
In fact, the racist Republican Party of Harpies is stronger than at any
other post Civil War time in our history.
I used to love Malcolm X's response when he was asked
"Are you violent?" He said no,
he was not violent and that he was nonviolent BUT he was NOT nonviolent against people who were violent to him. I am not
advocating violence but I always could understand why Malcolm X said what he did.
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