Day: January 6, 2017

I am sick and tired of hearing that Barack Obama is a failed president. Every time I turn on the news someone is saying this. Today as I dropped my eldest off for school we listened to the local hip hop station chronicle the abuse leveled at a handicapped white man by four black kids. What those kids did is deplorable. The fact that it is being deemed a hate crime based on race alone is, IMHO, a mistake because it appeared to be more about the disability than the color of his skin. Furthermore, the coverage by this sham of a radio news minute was more about Obama’s reaction and raising the question ‘would he have felt differently if the racial roles were reversed?’ That is a stupid question. As a result, it led to a caller saying this: “President Obama is a lame duck. Being half white and half black he should have been able to bring our country together.” That is a prime example of magical thinking. Really? How was he supposed to bring us together? How does the appearance of one man suddenly make everything better? This is the same manner of thinking that made people think that baseball was suddenly not racist because they let Jackie Robinson play, and as a result let more black (and eventually other races) players play. Of course we ignore the extremely painful period that Robinson himself suffered and the far worse treatment that the next series of black players suffered because the spotlight was on Robinson, so the others in the league could continue to openly abuse the next batch of non-white players.

Obama will never be able to live up to the expectations of the majority of the American people, because the expectations were unrealistic. Based on what I continue to hear, Obama didn’t do a damn thing as president for anyone or anything. I won’t scroll through his accomplishments here, but needless to say he did a hell of a lot for our nation and could’ve done quite a bit more had the Republican party been willing to engage him at all in a conversation. Instead they built an 8 year platform around the idea of making sure he failed and actively resisting everything he did regardless of whether it was good for the country and their constituency or not.

That is what a black president faced in America: Unimaginable odds and no support from half the country’s politicians. So, when we say Obama is a failure lets rethink that. He did the best he could ice skating uphill in an ice storm. He made it further than anyone else would have.

 

There are missing posts out there. I know where they live–in notebooks and text messages. They will appear here over time, but the importance of getting them here right away has faded. This is largely due to the fact that practically nobody reads the blog. For me the writing of the post and the application of ten minutes of my life minimum each day to the cause is enough for me to be satisfied with the writing. The posting itself has been problematic and has become less important as my hits dwindle down to one or two a day. That brings me to the question of why do I do it at all? Some of it is accountability. Some of it ego. The better part of it is this idea of having a presence on the web and a history that goes with that presence so that I may one day look back on this and say, ‘I made something.’ 2614 straight days of blogging is no small feat. Who knows the number count when I shed this mortal coil.

Okay that may have been over the top. In a more realistic and down to earth sense, the blog keeps me grounded. It lets me know that I am a writer first and I am writing for an audience. I can forget that on occasion and I can go in the other direction and think of nothing more than the audience, losing my sense of story and joy in the need to create something for a specific type of reader.

10 minutes is really not enough and once it becomes enough I know that means I’m burned out and need to do serious soul searching to get back in the writer’s mind.