Here's Sasha, and Malia the First Kids with Bo the First Dawg hanging out at their home, the White House. Though as ya know I'm pissed as hell with their old man I still love them. Well okay I dig 'all' the Obama's despite the First Daddy's bleep ups.
I guess I'm just an old softy from the 1960's on this score. I can remember when interracial marriage was illegal here in the land of the free. Heaven's sakes because of the Jim Crow laws I couldn't even be a boy scout back then.
I really wanted to be one too.
Now we got a Black guy as the President of the United States of America. Hey that ain't nuthin' gang. Sometimes I forget just how revolutionary all this is. 400 years in the making, and all that. In a way President Obama don't have to do anything, but stay alive for the next three years to be successful.
'Of course' the whole establishment is out to destroy him. A rightwing commentator said outright the he "wants" him to fail.
Bleep that guy.
Obama was handed a sinking ship, and is doing what he can to stop the holes below the waterline. Which btw he is doing. It'll be years before that is recognized. So I have no other expectations than I want him to stay alive till 2012 or 2016 then retire, and give lectures around the world
Amen.
(How well I remember this awful mess.)
6 comments:
More than 40 years ago when I began working as a news reporter for newspapers and for radio and television, the first black mayors were taking office in big cities, e.g., New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, etc. After listening to a few political pundits discussing the "changes" and its causes and implications, I think I figured it out better than the senior journalists and commentators at that time. In truth, after more than a century of white-run urban political machines plundering this country's public treasuries, cities, towns and counties could no longer provide services to residents nor could they really pay the pensions of all the retired bureaucrats. Things had reached such an awful mess, that the only black politicians were willing to take the top jobs as mayors and aldermen. Despite years of dashed hopes and cancelled promises, black politicians knew that with a little power to use as leverage they could obtain cooperation of economically oppressed groups, and bring the cities back to life. In the past half century, American cities have improved, but few folks have long enough memories to have noticed.
Now, my point is: the U.S.A. has been consuming and dissipating its capital, and skewing the whole system of rewards and pumishments so Wall Street parasites are running out economy, and almost no one knows how to change the pilot or the helmsman without wrecking the vehicle. The country is sort of where the cities were 40-plus years ago. Therefore, Pres. Obama may be only the first of several black presidents in the 21st century, cuz quite of few of the white boys will calculate they can have happier careers in Congress than the White House.
@graymogul
You really believe that American cities have improved over the last 50 years?
Unless you think things such as the monstrosities that Donald Trump builds, the turning of "the Deuce" into a Disneyworld for suburban breeders, and the hyper-commercialization of almost all the interesting areas, SoHo, the East and West Village, Chelsea and Hells Kitchen, just for starters, and in the process making them unaffordable to all but the economic elite, even turning Sidney into a homeless person in the process, then you have rocks in your head.
Where were you 50 years ago? Any city in America was more vibrant, more diverse, more colorful and had more depth than anything we see today.
D. Orlov gives us a good orientation on where we stand today:
"The ship is on the rocks, water is rising, and the captain is shouting 'Full steam ahead! We are sailing to Afghanistan!' Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge, or do you desert your post in the engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats? If you thought that the previous episode of uncontrolled debt expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes, and economic hollowing-out was silly, then I predict that you will find this next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomic straws even sillier. Except that it won’t be funny: what is crashing now is our life support system: all the systems and institutions that are keeping us alive. And so I don’t recommend passively standing around and watching the show – unless you happen to have a death wish.
Right now the Washington economic stimulus team is putting on their Scuba gear and diving down to the engine room to try to invent a way to get a diesel engine to run on seawater. They spoke of change, but in reality they are terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status quo. But this game will soon be over, and they don’t have any idea what to do next."
I think Orlov has it about right. Unfortunately.
Hi graymogul,
Yeah I came to the same conclusion years ago. As soon as a system is stripped, and used up they hand it off to the Blacks or Hispanics.
Sort of like the suburbs they wouldn't let my family into back in the early 1960's.
They're abandoning those places now as they rot, and fall apart. So 'now' they let us in as they flee back to the city.
I agree that the Country is where the inner cities were 40 years ago.
However I'm not so sure of a turn around for the nation.
Some of our city's have come back others like Detroit are frankly dead, and will never come back.
Indeed they're saying they want that city to revert to farmland,..which I still think is a good idea.
The country's "come back" will be like that. Here, and there, hit, and miss.
We will never have the America of the 1950's again. That was a once in 10,000 years burst of wealth.
I expect that era to become a world wide myth like Atlantis.
Hi pinkpauper, Anon, and Zaek.
In these times I think being homeless or knowing someone in that state is something a near majority of Americans will experience.
When I was wandering I met some that were formerly professionals.
The bigoted image of the druggie, the insane or dim witted as the typical homeless is wrong.
Always was.
I was just speaking with someone about having my "Homeless Wings". This is a worldwide economic war of survival.
Some of us are P.O.W's. The millions in our prisons.
Some are at the front. Activists, and the compassionate fighting for justice.
Some of us have been in the trenches. The Post Industrial Homeless of which I was one.
Earned my damned Wings I did, and lived to tell the tale.
I was lucky. Too many aren't.
However like all wars this one will eventually end. I hang on to see that day.
Stay tuned.
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