Ladies and gents, I feel the urge this afternoon to elaborate a bit on factors underlying my full throated, heart felt support of Barack Obama, so often scorned here. I fully realize it violates one of my favorite earthy propositions (Henry Ford II's "never apologize, never explain"). Let me first say that I fully understand a goodly amount of the revulsion at the prospect of a black President. Many of my fellow Americans and good friends have been turned off for decades by an irritating exposure to welfare queens, affirmative action, and the downward spiral of the black underclass. I feel your pain, sincerely. But if I may, and without condescension, I venture to suggest that many here are viewing the 21st century American racial scene "through a glass darkly".
Let me quickly add that I also appreciate that much of the revulsion arises from the leftist philosophy that taints all Democrats. And, I have two things to say about that. One, at least the Democrats remain true to their principles as contrasted to the abysmal abandonment of anything resembling conservatism by the Republicans. Second, and I grant you this is just my opinion, Obama is a decidedly moderate left-winger.
I have not come to my circa 2008 conclusions via any measure of "white guilt", a charge often made at me or about me in this forum. Also, I do not arrive at them based on some inflated impression of my own "insights". They are simply based on my own life experiences and my observation of American history.
First, the experiences. I was born, and have spent almost all my life, in what has become a middle America rust-belt city .... just forty years ago it was home base for five Fortune 500 companies. It now has one(?), zero (?) .. (it's not a fun thing to watch and keep score on). GWB and his minions certainly did not solely bring this about but, again IMHO, they quite possibly have applied the a death blow to the middle class and to American industry (never mind sovereignty, solvency, and worldwide respect). This morning's paper carried a list of the ten U.S. cities with lowest median household income. Yeppers, we made it.
My Dad was a UAW member, not a zealot, but one of the faceless mass that made up that association. The father of one of my best friends (Jim) in high school and college and was a Christian immigrant from Lebanon (I joked that my Dad immigrated from Tennessee). Jim's Dad and mine retired from the Chevy transmission plant in Toledo. We each got the importance of education lectured into us. Jim and I invested in a Christmas tree lot one year while we were in college. We both later started separate small businesses. He became a millionaire but died in a tragic auto accident out on Rt. 23. I emerged solvent but not wealthy from my twenty-year venture.
Jim went to Catholic schools, I to public. Our community has long been ethnic blue-collar.... Poles, Germans, Hungarians, Blacks, Mexicans, Arabs and Heinz 57 varieties like me. In grade school I developed a close friendship with a Black kid from two districts away. He occasionally came all the way over to my house to play backyard basketball. Later we went to high school and he played quarterback behind me. He was killed a couple years after high school. The more things change, the more they stay the same. In that same high school I had a few black classmates in my bookish classes (tracking was well established then) but i had a random sample of the population in homeroom. gym class, etc., so I got a broad exposure. Oh sure, I had some scrapes with black kids but never enough to shake me from my conviction that there are good folk and bad apples in every grouping or class of people.
In my adult years, as happenstance would have it, I made the acquaintance of a black guy in my golf league who later became my league partner (he's a lot of fun and a damned good golfer). An attorney, he also later represented me on several occasions. I have had black employees including managers and, late in my business career had the privilege of working under a an outstanding black executive .... one of the two best leaders I have personally encountered in my many working years. My kids had some black teachers, more good ones than bad (similar to the apocryphal little girl who, when she was good, was very, very good but when she was bad she was horrid ).
The history part? I attribute much of the long standing racial bad blood partly to historical circumstance (a divided nation for many decades). But it's at least equally attributable to well meaning(?) but not very intelligent politicians,
Number one, Lincoln. We are the only western nation on earth that resorted to a bloody internecine war to eliminate slavery. Skipping over the Klan and Jim Crow all the way to LBJ, the idiot (what is it about Texas pols?) that set integration back almost a hundred years and destroyed black family structure with his Great Society. This wonderful system of rewarding sloth and immorality brought a couple of previous decades of progress to a screeching halt and slowly but surely turned black communities into hellish social cesspools led by poverty pimps. This was followed by our long period of affirmative action that was encouraged by one party and abetted by the other. Thinking people of all hues recognize this nonsense as being as wrong-headed as other such schemes like forced housing integration and bussing to schools.
Well this turned out to be a bit of a wandering diatribe but may it provide a few clues (as opposed to rationalizations) as to my populist attitudes and my chosen screen name. At any rate, as a man once said, "that's my story (or a little part of it) and I'm stickin' to it".