OBAMA

The name sounds foreign to many of us, and saying it in certain states, for example the red one I live in, will frequently start a tirade.  (The name itself is a bit odd.  Out of 44 presidents, his is the only Non-European surname.  We have 37 presidents with good old names off the British Isles, with most English, some Anglo-Saxon, some Welsh, some Irish, some Scottish, and some decidedly Celtic.  We have 3 Dutch names, and 1 German.  So much for the melting pot).

 Too often the tirade is about his appearance or his voice though the tirade never, ever, ever mentions race.  "This is not about race, its him."  Who are they lying to, themselves I think. "He is trying to make us communist", or "he's the next Hitler" (those people never seem to get that Hitler wasn't a communist.) "He is stupid". "He is------"something, something bad, something that is going to ruin the country.  Of course, I live in a state full of rabid born-again republicans.  For some reason, when rich powerful men start complaining about things not being good for them, my neighbors think they are part of that group. There is not a rich powerful man in the area, but they are all white--close enough.  We need racism and sexism and religionism (yes, I made it up, but what else would you call it when people line up behind religious affiliation like it is US or THEM---presidentially speaking, there have been 37 protestants, 4 unitarians, 2 quakers, 1 catholic and 1 jehovah's witness, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson had no listed religion and probably could not have even been elected these days because of it).

We need those things, because while we have those things, we don't have to worry about the real dividing line.  It is and always has been the HAVES and the HAVE-NOTS.  It isn't just money the HAVES possess, it is also power.  That was what started our own American Revolution.  Our colonies had money because the colonies were full of resources and the colonists were cleaning up, but the wealthy colonists did not have any power, and the employed (that might be slaves, bond servants, or other peasantry) had little of either.  That revolution was for Power, the power to determine your own laws, use the tax money for the good of your own people and not just send it back to the king.

In South Africa, the HAVES were all white, they were HAVES because they profited off the horrible misuse of the HAVE-NOTS and we called it apartheid and legalized racism and wrong.  It was a place in which a small percent of the population ruled the larger percent with no concern for the larger percents needs, seeing them as things not peers.  Mandela is a hero for attacking that beast.  But while that was an obvious wrong, it is far from the only place where a small group rules the vast majority to the detriment of that majority.

The French Revolution was very similar, the royals, the nobles, the landed had everything and the people cutting the wood and growing the food and sewing the clothes etc, etc, etc, were frequently hungry and could not afford medicine or shelter or other basic needs. The Russian Revolution that resulted in the rise of communism in the last century was from a similar cause.  They had seen the less than perfect results of the French and American Revolutions and like China tried Socialism.  Reality is, if you read about a republic (which we in America are) or a democracy (which we are not, but frequently claim to be) or communism or socialism, they sound wonderful.  They are all high-minded ideals in which everyone is equal, everyone is able to live to their highest potential.  Apparently, power does corrupt and absolute power really does corrupt absolutely. Add to that, what some professor from my ancient past once said, "its not hard to start a revolution, the hard part is stopping it where you want."  Wars are not led by high-minded idealists, they are led by people that aren't afraid to kill, to maim, to "get their hands"--or their followers hands "dirty".  And they never stop until the rich and powerful are back on top.  Humans are highly corruptible.  I don't understand it, but I have never had power or money.

But back to Obama.  My granddaughter was born during his first campaign.  Her mom was just starting to pay attention to politics and she followed the Obama campaign very closely.  My granddaughter has a kind of hero worship for the president.  By five she was looking at president pictures in old books and asking questions about the office.  She thinks she might want to be the first female president.  Since it hasn't happened yet I feel no need to burst that bubble.

Why has this president polarized the country so thoroughly?  What horrible thing has he done?  We made a huge deal about his birth, "he wasn't even born here" all over the internet, but he was, his mother was from Kansas, his father from Kenya.  And he was not alone, Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson had mothers born in England, Andrew Jackson's parents came here from Ireland, James Buchanan and Charles Arthur both had fathers born in Ireland.  Herbert Hoover's mother was born in Ontario, Canada.  Apparently, the problem is with Africa.  But all people came out of Africa.  How is this not racism?

Okay.  Perhaps it's his agenda.  He does seem very focused on getting health care available to all people whether or not they can afford it (I have never been able to figure out the down side to this, although I do suspect the AMA and Insurance and Pharmaceutical companies are leading the lobby against--personally I wanted a full blown nationalized healthcare.
And there is immigration reform (how many immigrant ancestors are in your family tree, mine is pretty full of them).
This term's focus on gun control (we have no problem with denying violent criminals their second amendment rights, but seem to think that more guns easily available is the answer to the countries woes.  If the militias weren't so full of racists, sexists, and religionists, I might actually be more against gun registration.  Maybe it really is just that we need gun education starting in grade school and everybody has to carry by age 18.  We would either need half the police or half the number of everything else.
It might be a new kind of birth control.  It sounds a lot like anarchy.
Then there is the attempt to get more jobs.  We (editorial, since I don't know anyone making minimum wage that would be included in that "we") don't want to raise the minimum wage because the powerful rich people would not make more jobs.  So maybe we would only need half as many jobs if the jobs paid enough to live on.
Seriously, who has ever been hired to do a job that is not needed.
Rich and powerful people don't make jobs to provide poor people with jobs, they make new jobs because they have work that needs done and that work will make them a profit.  The amount of money involved in the difference between the current minimum wage and the new proposed minimum wage won't even make a blip on their radar.  They don't worry about their profits in dollar or ten dollar amounts, they worry about them in millions.
Keeping the workers underpaid just makes their profits higher, but no workers means no profit.  Not one of them is doing their own work for what they are profiting from.  I am also a fan of lowering  the amount of money salaried people can make and still get over-time.  Why should anyone not qualify for overtime.  If the job takes longer than 40 hours, maybe it is another job.  Paying one person  one salary to do two people's worth of work is a great way to raise your own profits.  But it is not right and there is another job. (amazing, isn't it)

Next is climate change.  In my state, we took a vote and their is no such thing.  We have never seen a lot of the weird weather that has occurred in the last 50 years, but it isn't new.  And it isn't caused by man, only god can change the weather---its because of all the godless, other race/other religion, sexually different people that currently don't have to hide or live in fear of being shot/lynched/tarred&feathered.  In truth, we live in a closed system (mostly closed) and setting off chemical reactions and contaminating the water and spewing gases can"t NOT alter that closed system.  Every action has consequences (physics not philosophy) and we humans has obviously altered the earth in the last 5,000 years.  The speed we are altering it has gone up tremendously in the last 100 years and we need to plan for the future of not just ourselves but our distant descendants.  (I personally would like my great-great-great-great grandkids to be able to walk in the spring air and see butterflies and recent evidence of wildlife walking on a dirt path in the country)

Last is voter access.  While we Americans don't vote as often as we could, we should not have any problems voting.  How do I feel about voter id's.  Make id's free and easily accessible and that is fine.  But use the difficulty of getting an ID like the old Jim Crow laws, and you are exactly as wrong as you sound.  We have seen crookedness in the voting world.  District Lines changed to make one group more powerful, another less powerful.  Long lines the day of, no parking, no workers, trying to close on time even when it was not physically possible for all the voters registered to vote at that place to finish within the allotted time. We have become a nation of slick, self-centered, other-haters. Was that always who we were?

I think that is not new, but Obama,  who my granddaughter unfailingly calls President Obama, has given a whole slew of people with no representation, with no toe-hold in the system, with no way to grab the opportunities this country is supposedly so free with--hope.

Keeping hope alive--Thanks, President Obama.