November 4, 2008

What an amazing victory! Months ago, I had a heated exchange with someone who was accusing Obama of being Muslim. I snuffed the conversation by telling him, "Considering the amazing powers you possess that enable you to divine some one's true nature based only on their name, you must also be very familiar with a terrorist agent who infiltrated the Oval Office as a sleeper agent of Mossad... a PRESIDENT who's first name was "Abraham"! I never heard from him again. Tonight I sent this person a note. Dear ObamaisaMuslim, YOUR PRESIDENT is now a BLACK AMERICAN! I've LIVED in a world FILLED with WHITE HATRED, and I cannot express how ELATED I am at this turn of events. Growing up, a white kid in Texas, I was surrounded by the most deeply racist jokes, it was part of the cultural fabric of Southern Baptist Hypocrisy promoted by CHRISTIANS who assumed they had the higher moral ground. As a child, in the downtown department stores of Dallas, Texas, I saw something unusual. Drinking fountains made of BLACK porcelain next to white drinking fountains. I was drawn to them, preferred to drink from them because they stood out. I had never seen this. Beautiful! Rare! Like a Black Pearl! My mother, who, like myself, was from Wisconsin, blessed me by allowing me to remain ignorant of the TRUE significance of these fountains. It was the little, old, blue-haired, Southern Baptist ladies who would approach me, saying, "Oh, NO, Sonny! You shouldn't drink from THOSE, They're DIRTY!" It was years later that I finally figured out what the HELL those old bitties were raving about. Racial HATRED was so endemic, that at the State Fair of Texas, there was a dunk tank with a sign that read, "DUNK THE NIGGER!" A black kid from the neighborhood was paid to sit in there and let bone-headed red necks dunk him for money. I ADMIRED that kid, because he had more guts and character than all of the inbred morons he was facing combined. He would TAUNT them, JEER at them, LAUGH at them... tell them they had "Teeny-weenie-peenies", and the corn-fed cro-magnons would get red-face, infuriated and BUY cluster upon cluster of softballs to throw at him. THAT kid was IN CONTROLL! But, most of all, I HATED the jug-headed racists for the obscenities THEY projected upon ME as a WHITE KID and the boundaries they imposed between myself and blacks! For decades after, when I spoke with an African American, I saw myself AS one of the RACISTS through the eyes of all African Americans who grew up being hammered into submission, being told they were worthless... I felt SHAME, guilty by association with the people of my own skin color. I HATED that! What I found, when I was working with African American co-workers, was that THEY were patient, waiting for ME to get over it, waiting to see if there was someone inside ME who could just deal with them as human beings. Miraculous! When I was a child, it was ILLEGAL for black children and white children to attend the same summer camp in Texas. My mother was a camp counselor in the summer and my sister and I would go along for three weeks each summer. One summer, we were on the way to camp and my mother casually mentioned that all the other kids at the camp were African Americans this time around. We had not been taught to HATE by our parents, so it merely seemed like an interesting diversion. Later in life, I learned that the three of us were the very first whites to challenge that TEXAS LAW by integrating a summer camp... TEN YEARS before the DALLAS Independent School District was FORCED to integrate by Federal Mandate! I have to tell you, "ObammaisaMuslim", that your bluff is absolutely transparent to me. I see the cringing, weakling within you, and know the strength and nobility of those you fear in absolute ignorance. I do hope you are able to grow beyond the tiny-mindedness of your prejudices and come to join us in this miraculous moment of triumph. It's the animistic FEAR and HATE we strive to eliminate. Our hope is to include and embrace EVERYBODY!