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By: Harold Michael Harvey
I have been missing in action of late, much to the displeasure of my editor. You see my editor has been my sidekick for thirty years. She relishes finding my faults and pointing them out with a sense of humor that both pains and refreshes my writing. I’ve not given her a cathartic vent in recent weeks. Thus she has time to find fault with sundry other aspects of my being, which is a sure prescription for writer’s block.
Not that my absence can be neatly summed up as writer’s block. I’ve been busy fighting my publisher for much needed revisions to the proofs of Paper Puzzle. It seems these days the traditional publishing houses have reduced their editorial staffs in cost cutting measures similar to most other industries. When duties overlap, little editorial miscues can make an otherwise Pulitzer Prize winning manuscript just an ordinary piece of literature. So when the personal editor says to change it, it’s worth slowing down the production process to get the necessary changes implemented.
I’ve also cut down a tree or two in the back yard with the assistance of my son and we are set with fire wood for the winter.
Additionally, my focus has not been on my son’s budding career as a sports writer for my hometown newspaper. A job I would loved to have had when I was his age. So he and I have spent the past few days talking about the importance of social media, as we approach the close of the first decade of this bold century. A century that is vastly different from the century of our birth; as different as his great grandparents’ birth century was from mine.
Big and small town newspapers have perhaps seen their golden days. The model that will survive the Craigslist pandemic will not look anything like the daily paper dropped on the doorsteps and driveways of American families before the advent of the information superhighway. Thus an enterprising reporter has to be on the look out for opportunities to expand his or her career.
“We,” says Mitch Joel, author of Six Pixels of Separation, “are connected to each other” by someone we personally know.
As is my habit, to drive this point home, I resorted to a story from the past. I told my son of walking into the book store my first day on campus at Tuskegee Institute and seeing the shelves loaded with Norman Mailer’s 1959 rant, Advertisement for Myself. It was strange to see the Harvard educated Mailer with more shelf space than the Institute’s own former student, Ralph Ellison, who had penned the brilliant novel Invisible Man.
At semester’s end the shelves were still overflowing with Mailer’s pitch to ensure his “present and future work....will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years.” Yet I bought and read it. I still have my copy. It is bounded today by a strip of clear tape.
Thus Mailer knew in 1959, any writer worth his or her ink had to engage in the self deception of advertising oneself for public consumption.
Mitch Joel, Chris Brogan and other social media gurus have learned what Mailer knew 50 years ago. So the son and I built a social media platform that says, “ hey world, get your sports news at Coley Harvey-MaconTechTalk on FaceBook and @MaconTechTalk on Twitter”. They are not technical posts, but technocrats are certainly welcome. The Tech in the name stands for Georgia Tech. Coley is the Georgia Tech beat reporter for The Telegraph in Macon, Georgia.
As we talked about Norman Mailer, in the background, a television news anchor waxed on about NASA’s pending aggression on the moon in search of ice beneath its core. My thoughts turned away from Mailer’s seminal work, Advertisements for Myself, to his epic depiction of the first manned moon landing, Of a fire On the Moon.
After the landing, it was not so much that man had visited the moon; what mattered now was getting them back into the lunar atmosphere. The spacecraft that had floated onto the moon’s surface like a singular snow flake on a blustery winter’s morning on earth, would require an enormous fiery explosion to get back to Apollo11, which was orbiting the earth in nervous anticipation, like a cheer leader waiting to be asked out by the captain of the football team.
Why then, with two wars, an economy in recovery and political fanaticism running amuck, is there a national fascination with a bombardment of the moon 40 years later? Could this aggression on the moon, to paraphrase Mailer: represent the core of some magnetic human force called Americanism, or is this exploration simply the knights of a new silent majority emerging from human history, with an African in the White House, in order to colonize distant planets.
We watched this morning in anticipation of the fiery explosion NASA had promised. We saw nothing as depicted in the models; no light, no dust, no plumb of smoke coming from the crater on the moon. What happened this morning may not be known by average citizens for another 40 years. Perhaps Mailer was correct in 1969 when he postulated that machines may possess a psychology of their own. Imagine, machines with minds of their own, so unpredictable in functionality that the massive brain trust at NASA can not predict the outcome.
Which brings me to my closing point. For the third time in history a sitting American president has received the Nobel Peace Prize. This year’s award goes to President Obama. He was preceded by Teddy “Rough Rider” Roosevelt and Thomas Woodrow Wilson. All three American presidents were confronted with at least one war which threatened the economic and political security of the nation.
Roosevelt was the nation’s first strong chief executive. The power of the oval office has increased exponentially since the early 1900s when he first flexed his executive authority. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for volunteering to mediate a dispute which threatened to disrupt Western access to raw materials in the Far East. His efforts led to the end of the Russo-Japanese War.
Wilson, following World War I worked to form the League of Nations, the precursor of today’s United Nations. Although the League of Nations could not hold the peace, Wilson was rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1918.
In his brief time in office, Obama has extended an olive branch to Europe, Asia, Africa and islands of the seas. The common thread which binds these three sitting presidents is a belief that the security of its neighbors means long term economic and political security for America. Their actions were outside the box of conventional thinking.
Yet the nay sayers will not allow President Obama any peace. On the social network, Twitter, I recently mirrored the rants of the fanatical right. I deliberately presented an extreme opposing view to their displeasure over Obama’s selection for the Nobel Peace Prize. After a few rounds of nonsense the mob, as they call themselves, cried they were sick of me and no longer wanted to engage in further discussion. I wanted them to see exactly how they appear to other people. If my conduct was nauseating, theirs was equally vile. One can only hope this group will reevaluate their conduct in light of the assault projected upon their extreme positions.
Mailer prophetically penned the frustration of the present day mob in his 1959 piece titled The White Negro. The consternation of the current day mob causes them to blur the lines between socialism and democracy. Following Mailer’s line of thought, the mob’s fear that the nation will resort to socialism has to do with the ascendancy of the “Negro,” or in our day, a black president.
“It is no accident,” Mailer writes, “the source ..:is the Negro for the Negro has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.” Indeed, Mailer is right, and we are now into our third century of living on the edge. If the Negro has learned anything from the American experience, it is how not to govern; it is how to share power for the betterment of all. It is precisely this fact, that the mob fails to understand.
Thus Obama is stuck in the craw of the mob causing the mob to gag, just like the Twitterer who said I “make her sick”. They gag on Obama’s every success and every seeming failure. This nauseating feeling fuels the mob’s desire to denigrate each of Obama’s presidential experiences. He’s a bad man and must of necessity be thrown out of office either through the rise of the “birth certificate movement,” or by way of a military coupe, this band seems to argue.
Hopefully the mob will be able to extricate Obama from its throat, before they miss the most innovative presidency since fellow Nobel Peace Prize recipient Teddy Roosevelt represented both the GOP and the Bull Moose Party in the White House.
© October 9, 2009
Showing posts with label president obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label president obama. Show all posts
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
Mommas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Dumb Millionaires
By: Harold Michael Harvey
I’m a story teller. I learned to tell stories sitting at the side of my granddaddy Charlie. Although I never heard him orally tell a story. He was a very silent man and seldom spoke. When he did speak it was enough to make E. F. Hutton listen. He usually had something profound to say. A white mob once stopped to listen to what he had to say. It threw them off the tracks of the black man they were following and the man’s life was spared. While my grandfather talked to the men, my grandmother huddled the children and cried out, “Lord have mercy!” She prayed for the black man and the white men alike. I don’t know if her prayer diffused the situation or not. What I took away from it was not hatred for either the man running nor the men bent on murder who chased after him. I learned by example to pray in the midst of trouble.
My granddad lived his stories. He taught hard work, honesty, and letting your word be your bond through the manner he lived his life.
I learned to tell stories by sitting next to my grandad when the men in the farming community where we lived would drop by after a day’s work. In the summertime we would gather in a circle in the yard. Someone would light a fire in a barrel to smoke away the mosquitoes and flies. That’s when the stories started. Each man would take a turn telling a story. There was laughter galore. In the winter months we would gather around the fireplace, toss some sweet potatoes under the ashes and listen to tales of ghosts and goblins.
Years later when I left home for college my grand mom, Puella had but one admonishment: “Don’t be down there drinking no dope.” Marijuana was the craze in that day. Granny didn’t know you didn’t drink it. But she wanted to make it clear I was not to do anything that would make me behave less than I had been taught.
From the letters I have received of late, my stories pain some of my readers. I regret that they do. I come from a long line of story tellers, preachers and teachers who took the lemons of life experiences (the good, the bad, the indifferent) and made a lesson plan of lemonade.
When I coached youth league baseball, long before the term “teachable moment” was in the national lexicon, I used the mistakes my kids made to teach life principles. When I halted practice and instructed the infielders in the mechanics of the rundown play, they would say, “here goes coach Harvey with another one of his stories.” The rundown play is a perfect time to teach team work and responsibility, not only for yourself but for your teammates as well. In this way we built moral character and laid the foundation for a championship baseball team. The story was painful at the time because the life experience was oozing ugly before our very eyes. I didn’t let them hide from the fact that a bone-headed play distracted from the team’s goal of winning a championship.
Now, when I encounter a member of the Homestead Grays Youth Baseball Team and Educational Academy, they tell me how beneficial those life lessons were. I have my grandparents to thank for any success my baseball players have had. I will put their moral character up against any group of young men born any where in the world between 1983 and 1986.
Which brings me to the point of this piece. I sat dumbfounded before the television last weekend and witnessed the worst behavior imaginable from three very rich and very spoiled brats. They are in order of meltdown Michael Jordan, Serena Williams and Kayne West.
I’m not going to ask what were they thinking, because obviously they were not. But their behavior does bring forth the question; what were they smoking, drinking, snorting, sniffing or shooting?
Michael Jordan, the greatest pea shooter of his generation made a mockery of his induction into the National Basketball Hall of Fame. He made it a point to denigrate every single person whom he had passed along the way to greatness. His mom was there in the audience, how could she be proud of her progeny? The trouble with Michael happened a long time ago when someone should have periodically taken the basketball out of his hands and substituted a book for the basketball. Someone at the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Wilmington, North Carolina should have read the Book of Micah to him. Instead of a graceful and humble warrior claiming the spoils of war, we get Jordan at age 46 foaming at the mouth because he was able to overcome the obstacles of life and stand atop the heap. It’s a good thing we now have a Harvard educated black man who has a mean left handed jump shot in the White House to emulate.
Serena Williams, so gifted a tennis player that the only person who can consistently beat her is her sister Venus, and herself. She is an object lesson of what happens when you take a small child and put a racket in her hands without occasionally lobbing a book across the net. As success came along the way, there were a lot of empty spaces that were taken up with bad precepts and examples. Thus, when under fire instead of choking down her expressions of outrage from an official call, she, in the vernacular of the day, twittered them to the whole world in 140 characters, more or less. Contrast Serena’s verbal outburst with the glare President Obama gave to Joe Wilson on the floor of the House last week. If looks could kill, Joe Wilson would have been pulverized. Yet Obama knew he could not say or do what he felt at the time. His parents and grandparents put something in his hands, his heart and inside his head. That something seems to be lacking in this world class athlete.
Kayne West, a multi talented and disturbed black man bum rushed Taylor Swift, a 19 year old white girl at the MTV Video Music Awards show last week. He took the microphone out of her hands and told those assembled he thought someone other than Ms. Swift should have won. He is still trying to out run grief, several years after the death of a mom, who tried her best to get him enrolled in college. His behavior was unbelievable, uncalled for and undeniably rude. He has at least apologized and plans to get off the public stage and begin the grieving process. My advice is to also go back to school.
In my time, I have given my mom some proud moments and some not so proud moments. I have pledged to her one more proud moment before she makes her curtain call. I am working hard every day to make good on that promise.
Mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be dumb millionaires, teach them reading, writing, “critical historical thinking” and such.
© September 15, 2009
I’m a story teller. I learned to tell stories sitting at the side of my granddaddy Charlie. Although I never heard him orally tell a story. He was a very silent man and seldom spoke. When he did speak it was enough to make E. F. Hutton listen. He usually had something profound to say. A white mob once stopped to listen to what he had to say. It threw them off the tracks of the black man they were following and the man’s life was spared. While my grandfather talked to the men, my grandmother huddled the children and cried out, “Lord have mercy!” She prayed for the black man and the white men alike. I don’t know if her prayer diffused the situation or not. What I took away from it was not hatred for either the man running nor the men bent on murder who chased after him. I learned by example to pray in the midst of trouble.
My granddad lived his stories. He taught hard work, honesty, and letting your word be your bond through the manner he lived his life.
I learned to tell stories by sitting next to my grandad when the men in the farming community where we lived would drop by after a day’s work. In the summertime we would gather in a circle in the yard. Someone would light a fire in a barrel to smoke away the mosquitoes and flies. That’s when the stories started. Each man would take a turn telling a story. There was laughter galore. In the winter months we would gather around the fireplace, toss some sweet potatoes under the ashes and listen to tales of ghosts and goblins.
Years later when I left home for college my grand mom, Puella had but one admonishment: “Don’t be down there drinking no dope.” Marijuana was the craze in that day. Granny didn’t know you didn’t drink it. But she wanted to make it clear I was not to do anything that would make me behave less than I had been taught.
From the letters I have received of late, my stories pain some of my readers. I regret that they do. I come from a long line of story tellers, preachers and teachers who took the lemons of life experiences (the good, the bad, the indifferent) and made a lesson plan of lemonade.
When I coached youth league baseball, long before the term “teachable moment” was in the national lexicon, I used the mistakes my kids made to teach life principles. When I halted practice and instructed the infielders in the mechanics of the rundown play, they would say, “here goes coach Harvey with another one of his stories.” The rundown play is a perfect time to teach team work and responsibility, not only for yourself but for your teammates as well. In this way we built moral character and laid the foundation for a championship baseball team. The story was painful at the time because the life experience was oozing ugly before our very eyes. I didn’t let them hide from the fact that a bone-headed play distracted from the team’s goal of winning a championship.
Now, when I encounter a member of the Homestead Grays Youth Baseball Team and Educational Academy, they tell me how beneficial those life lessons were. I have my grandparents to thank for any success my baseball players have had. I will put their moral character up against any group of young men born any where in the world between 1983 and 1986.
Which brings me to the point of this piece. I sat dumbfounded before the television last weekend and witnessed the worst behavior imaginable from three very rich and very spoiled brats. They are in order of meltdown Michael Jordan, Serena Williams and Kayne West.
I’m not going to ask what were they thinking, because obviously they were not. But their behavior does bring forth the question; what were they smoking, drinking, snorting, sniffing or shooting?
Michael Jordan, the greatest pea shooter of his generation made a mockery of his induction into the National Basketball Hall of Fame. He made it a point to denigrate every single person whom he had passed along the way to greatness. His mom was there in the audience, how could she be proud of her progeny? The trouble with Michael happened a long time ago when someone should have periodically taken the basketball out of his hands and substituted a book for the basketball. Someone at the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Wilmington, North Carolina should have read the Book of Micah to him. Instead of a graceful and humble warrior claiming the spoils of war, we get Jordan at age 46 foaming at the mouth because he was able to overcome the obstacles of life and stand atop the heap. It’s a good thing we now have a Harvard educated black man who has a mean left handed jump shot in the White House to emulate.
Serena Williams, so gifted a tennis player that the only person who can consistently beat her is her sister Venus, and herself. She is an object lesson of what happens when you take a small child and put a racket in her hands without occasionally lobbing a book across the net. As success came along the way, there were a lot of empty spaces that were taken up with bad precepts and examples. Thus, when under fire instead of choking down her expressions of outrage from an official call, she, in the vernacular of the day, twittered them to the whole world in 140 characters, more or less. Contrast Serena’s verbal outburst with the glare President Obama gave to Joe Wilson on the floor of the House last week. If looks could kill, Joe Wilson would have been pulverized. Yet Obama knew he could not say or do what he felt at the time. His parents and grandparents put something in his hands, his heart and inside his head. That something seems to be lacking in this world class athlete.
Kayne West, a multi talented and disturbed black man bum rushed Taylor Swift, a 19 year old white girl at the MTV Video Music Awards show last week. He took the microphone out of her hands and told those assembled he thought someone other than Ms. Swift should have won. He is still trying to out run grief, several years after the death of a mom, who tried her best to get him enrolled in college. His behavior was unbelievable, uncalled for and undeniably rude. He has at least apologized and plans to get off the public stage and begin the grieving process. My advice is to also go back to school.
In my time, I have given my mom some proud moments and some not so proud moments. I have pledged to her one more proud moment before she makes her curtain call. I am working hard every day to make good on that promise.
Mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be dumb millionaires, teach them reading, writing, “critical historical thinking” and such.
© September 15, 2009
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Joe Wilson the new face of Angry White America
By: Harold Michael Harvey
I’ve often wondered how the individuals behind the face of angry white America really look. I’ve wondered ever since I attended the 15 April 2009 Tax Day Protest in downtown Atlanta. I have written else where about that angry white mob I found myself in across from the steps of the state capitol (The Three Reasons I Hate Being In A Crowd of Angry White People, The Harvey Journal, 16 April 2009). I wasn’t sure, but I had a hunch it was similar to the faces in the two other crowds of angry white people I had encountered in my short existence on the planet.
When President Barack Obama called a joint session of Congress to discuss his health care reform legislation the other day, it became painfully and shamefully clear just what the angry face of white America looked like.
It is predominately male, southern and bigoted. Just like the group that trespassed on my grandfather’s farm in 1955 and the group that stood outside the Lanier Jr. High School for Boys shouting insults at me back in 1965. I’ve cited these two incidents several times but I’m not sure my readers get the point. The point is not so much that these events occurred. They occurred on a regular basis back then. The object lesson here is, both of these groups thought they were right in their actions.
The mob following a pack of bloodhounds out hunting for a black man in the mid 1950s felt justified in their search and in the swift lynching that was sure to follow had they found him.
The young boys standing outside a public high school yelling “two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate” were absolutely sure they held the moral responsibility to defeat the “communist inspired” move towards the elimination of segregation in the South. Their arrogance led them to defy school authority and menacingly intimidate any black person who dared to cross their protest line that September morning 44 years ago last week.
Time, however, has a way of avenging all. We now know, which is to say that any white person of reasonable intelligence now knows (black people knew all along), that both groups of angry white males were wrong. We also know that what they feared and what roused them to anger cannot stop the turning tide of time. For what angers southern bigots and what they fear is a social order of shared responsibility after centuries of unlimited power and authority.
Male, southern and bigoted, just like Joe Wilson the Columbia, South Carolina congressman who represents the Second District in the United States House of Representatives. He has power. He can debate the issue in committee and on the floor of the House. He has a vote. Yet he resorts to heckling!
What manner of American is this who would sit on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and interrupt an important speech by the president of the United States of America with shouts of “you lie?”
Male, southern and bigoted. Just like the three dozen or more people who gathered outside the congressman’s office in Columbia, South Carolina recently who praised Wilson’s rudeness as an act of heroism. Not only does he owe the president an apology, but he owes an apology to the American people who tuned in to listen to an important policy address on health care reform, only to be distracted by a heckler disguised as a congressman.
Male, southern and bigoted. Just like William Browning, the 55 year old South Carolina man quoted by the Associated Press as saying: “I hope he [Joe Wilson] sticks to his guns. If they reprimand him, so be it.”
Such arrogance displayed by Joe Wilson and William Browning is appalling. The utter disrespect for Barack Obama oozes out of their pores by the pound.
How does one come to hate a person whose policies are different? There is but one simple answer. It is time to stop playing games and call a spade a spade. It’s racism pure and simple. Southern bigoted males have a very low tolerance for Obama’s skin in the game. It doesn’t matter southern bigoted males have rolled out a few black faces at their rallies. The majority of black people see through this ruse and are not taken in by the slight of hand of a band who proclaim an interest in restoring the “American way,” like patriots of old who dodged the race question in their day by counting darker citizens as chattel and worth, according to the federalist of that day, a mere three-fifth of the measure of a white man.
Grow up southerners. You are pouting like little boys pout on the playground. Like those little boys pouted on the steps of Lanier Jr. High School for Boys in ‘65 .
Watching this band of anti-government protesters march in the District of Columbia on 12 September 2009, I saw the same agitated and snarling faces I saw in the mob back in ‘55 and the mob of ‘65. You could contrast these angry faces with the determined, yet peaceable expressions on the faces of the men and women who attempted to marched across the Edmund Pettits Bridge on Bloody Sunday. When one considers this dichotomy of history, one realizes that the arch of justice stills bends towards the metaphysical progeny of Selma.
Alas, we knew this day was coming. We have known since the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. We have known since Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. We have known since Martin told the nation about a dream that he had had.
Get over it! America is big enough for all of us to live in peace, harmony and prosperity.
Let’s say for the sake of argument the cause of angry white Americans is right and Health Care Reform will place a huge burden on grandchildren of conservative fiscal minded Americans. The corollary is also true. To do nothing will continue to place a tremendous burden on the families of that other America who are also a part of the grand melting pot that makes us unique in the universal set of world democracies.
Thus the reasonable discourse should be: How do we provide adequate health care for all American citizens without providing future generations with a tax bill that is insurmountable?
Anything else makes great sound bites for the six o’clock news and fodder to increase the great divide between conservatives and progressives, between Christians and the ungodly, between whites, blacks, browns, reds, yellows and the many shades in the box of crayons, that did not exist when the mob hunted for a black man on my grandfather’s farm back in ‘55.
© September 13, 2009
I’ve often wondered how the individuals behind the face of angry white America really look. I’ve wondered ever since I attended the 15 April 2009 Tax Day Protest in downtown Atlanta. I have written else where about that angry white mob I found myself in across from the steps of the state capitol (The Three Reasons I Hate Being In A Crowd of Angry White People, The Harvey Journal, 16 April 2009). I wasn’t sure, but I had a hunch it was similar to the faces in the two other crowds of angry white people I had encountered in my short existence on the planet.
When President Barack Obama called a joint session of Congress to discuss his health care reform legislation the other day, it became painfully and shamefully clear just what the angry face of white America looked like.
It is predominately male, southern and bigoted. Just like the group that trespassed on my grandfather’s farm in 1955 and the group that stood outside the Lanier Jr. High School for Boys shouting insults at me back in 1965. I’ve cited these two incidents several times but I’m not sure my readers get the point. The point is not so much that these events occurred. They occurred on a regular basis back then. The object lesson here is, both of these groups thought they were right in their actions.
The mob following a pack of bloodhounds out hunting for a black man in the mid 1950s felt justified in their search and in the swift lynching that was sure to follow had they found him.
The young boys standing outside a public high school yelling “two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate” were absolutely sure they held the moral responsibility to defeat the “communist inspired” move towards the elimination of segregation in the South. Their arrogance led them to defy school authority and menacingly intimidate any black person who dared to cross their protest line that September morning 44 years ago last week.
Time, however, has a way of avenging all. We now know, which is to say that any white person of reasonable intelligence now knows (black people knew all along), that both groups of angry white males were wrong. We also know that what they feared and what roused them to anger cannot stop the turning tide of time. For what angers southern bigots and what they fear is a social order of shared responsibility after centuries of unlimited power and authority.
Male, southern and bigoted, just like Joe Wilson the Columbia, South Carolina congressman who represents the Second District in the United States House of Representatives. He has power. He can debate the issue in committee and on the floor of the House. He has a vote. Yet he resorts to heckling!
What manner of American is this who would sit on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and interrupt an important speech by the president of the United States of America with shouts of “you lie?”
Male, southern and bigoted. Just like the three dozen or more people who gathered outside the congressman’s office in Columbia, South Carolina recently who praised Wilson’s rudeness as an act of heroism. Not only does he owe the president an apology, but he owes an apology to the American people who tuned in to listen to an important policy address on health care reform, only to be distracted by a heckler disguised as a congressman.
Male, southern and bigoted. Just like William Browning, the 55 year old South Carolina man quoted by the Associated Press as saying: “I hope he [Joe Wilson] sticks to his guns. If they reprimand him, so be it.”
Such arrogance displayed by Joe Wilson and William Browning is appalling. The utter disrespect for Barack Obama oozes out of their pores by the pound.
How does one come to hate a person whose policies are different? There is but one simple answer. It is time to stop playing games and call a spade a spade. It’s racism pure and simple. Southern bigoted males have a very low tolerance for Obama’s skin in the game. It doesn’t matter southern bigoted males have rolled out a few black faces at their rallies. The majority of black people see through this ruse and are not taken in by the slight of hand of a band who proclaim an interest in restoring the “American way,” like patriots of old who dodged the race question in their day by counting darker citizens as chattel and worth, according to the federalist of that day, a mere three-fifth of the measure of a white man.
Grow up southerners. You are pouting like little boys pout on the playground. Like those little boys pouted on the steps of Lanier Jr. High School for Boys in ‘65 .
Watching this band of anti-government protesters march in the District of Columbia on 12 September 2009, I saw the same agitated and snarling faces I saw in the mob back in ‘55 and the mob of ‘65. You could contrast these angry faces with the determined, yet peaceable expressions on the faces of the men and women who attempted to marched across the Edmund Pettits Bridge on Bloody Sunday. When one considers this dichotomy of history, one realizes that the arch of justice stills bends towards the metaphysical progeny of Selma.
Alas, we knew this day was coming. We have known since the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. We have known since Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. We have known since Martin told the nation about a dream that he had had.
Get over it! America is big enough for all of us to live in peace, harmony and prosperity.
Let’s say for the sake of argument the cause of angry white Americans is right and Health Care Reform will place a huge burden on grandchildren of conservative fiscal minded Americans. The corollary is also true. To do nothing will continue to place a tremendous burden on the families of that other America who are also a part of the grand melting pot that makes us unique in the universal set of world democracies.
Thus the reasonable discourse should be: How do we provide adequate health care for all American citizens without providing future generations with a tax bill that is insurmountable?
Anything else makes great sound bites for the six o’clock news and fodder to increase the great divide between conservatives and progressives, between Christians and the ungodly, between whites, blacks, browns, reds, yellows and the many shades in the box of crayons, that did not exist when the mob hunted for a black man on my grandfather’s farm back in ‘55.
© September 13, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
WARNING: This e-mail is a suspected phishing scam. Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Five Things President Obama Accomplished On His European Trip
By: Harold Michael Harvey
I’ve written elsewhere how enormously busy this president has been since taking office less than 100 days ago. He drafted and moved through congress the most massive spending legislation in the nation’s history, fired the president of General Motors Corporation and sent congress a three trillion dollar budget to wrestle with while he traveled across the pond to be wooed on the world stage.
What are the five things the president accomplished in his first major overseas foray?
1. He set a new tone and alerted the world that America came to listen and not to dictate. The strength of his message is that America is prepared to take back the moral authority it lost during the Bush years in the White House.
2. Queen Elizabeth was dazzled by the charm and grace of the president and Mrs. Obama. The Queen in a rare show of emotion hugged the waist of Mrs. Obama, who returned the show of affection without any of the backlash that other visiting officials received in the past.
3. He demonstrated his hand at settling disputes when he came between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Republic of China President Hu Jintao when the two argued over tax shelters in the Republic of China. Sarkozy threatened to walk out of the G-20 conference if he did not get his way. The American president witnessed the exchanged and got the two men to agree on a resolution to this sticky problem.
4. President Obama spoke to the Turkish Parliament and declared that America was not at war with Islam. This message is sure to resonate in the Muslim world and is the beginning of a dialogue between America and Saudi Arabia, a major broker in peace negotiations in Northeast Africa.
5. The president paid a surprised visit to the troops in Iraqi just hours after a car bomb killed several people outside the capital. His message to the troops clearly defined the American mission during his administration. He told the troops that it was time to turn over operations to the Iraqi forces. A sure signal that he will keep his campaign pledge to bring the troops home from Iraqi.
Pundits will spend the next several days talking about the success or failure of President Obama’s first tour abroad using the old paradigms of the 20 th century, but as I discovered last summer on the campaign trail, this president can not be judged by any model we have seen in the past.
There is a new world leader on center stage. He is humble, he is a diplomat. He is a peacemaker. Yet he must change the world to his vision on disarmament, as he did in resolving the dispute between France and the Republic of China, or he will leave his country weaker than it was when he began.
© April 8, 2009
I’ve written elsewhere how enormously busy this president has been since taking office less than 100 days ago. He drafted and moved through congress the most massive spending legislation in the nation’s history, fired the president of General Motors Corporation and sent congress a three trillion dollar budget to wrestle with while he traveled across the pond to be wooed on the world stage.
What are the five things the president accomplished in his first major overseas foray?
1. He set a new tone and alerted the world that America came to listen and not to dictate. The strength of his message is that America is prepared to take back the moral authority it lost during the Bush years in the White House.
2. Queen Elizabeth was dazzled by the charm and grace of the president and Mrs. Obama. The Queen in a rare show of emotion hugged the waist of Mrs. Obama, who returned the show of affection without any of the backlash that other visiting officials received in the past.
3. He demonstrated his hand at settling disputes when he came between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Republic of China President Hu Jintao when the two argued over tax shelters in the Republic of China. Sarkozy threatened to walk out of the G-20 conference if he did not get his way. The American president witnessed the exchanged and got the two men to agree on a resolution to this sticky problem.
4. President Obama spoke to the Turkish Parliament and declared that America was not at war with Islam. This message is sure to resonate in the Muslim world and is the beginning of a dialogue between America and Saudi Arabia, a major broker in peace negotiations in Northeast Africa.
5. The president paid a surprised visit to the troops in Iraqi just hours after a car bomb killed several people outside the capital. His message to the troops clearly defined the American mission during his administration. He told the troops that it was time to turn over operations to the Iraqi forces. A sure signal that he will keep his campaign pledge to bring the troops home from Iraqi.
Pundits will spend the next several days talking about the success or failure of President Obama’s first tour abroad using the old paradigms of the 20 th century, but as I discovered last summer on the campaign trail, this president can not be judged by any model we have seen in the past.
There is a new world leader on center stage. He is humble, he is a diplomat. He is a peacemaker. Yet he must change the world to his vision on disarmament, as he did in resolving the dispute between France and the Republic of China, or he will leave his country weaker than it was when he began.
© April 8, 2009
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