Meaningless Rants

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There will be a voluminous number of books and publications devoted to everything about the 2008 Election. There will be millions of words used to tell the story of the rise of a man with a Kenyan father and a name that sounds like the Afghan terrorist and shares a name with the Iraqi dictator from nowhere to the most powerful man on the planet. Nothing I say can properly describe the historic nature of this victory, not even with my penchant for exaggerations.

If I were to have a time machine, and I go back four years ago to write all that happened since 2007 when the primaries started, and I try to sell them to a publisher or a producer in Hollywood, I would be laughed out from the front door. No one with a great flight of imagination could come up with a story as dramatic as this.

Even now, I still have to make it all sink into me. Here we have the most powerful nation on earth. Its beginning was tainted with the sin of slavery of the black people. 143 years ago, blacks were still owned as slaves and they counted for 3/5 of a person. Emancipation proclamation didn’t end the struggle for African American. Segregation ruled the nation and it was in effect an apartheid nation. They could better exercise their civil rights barely 45 years ago when segregation officially ended. At to make the story even more biblical, Martin Luther King at exactly forty years ago had to say that he had been to the mountaintop, and he had seen the promised land, and while he might not get there, they as a people will get there.

I and many other people have said many bad things about the hypocrisy of the United States: about their double dealings with dictators and their apparent ignorance of the world. But now we are all reminded how this is a very exceptional nation. Except from Peru who voted for Alberto Fujimori, I could not name any other nation who willingly voted for the minority of a different skin color.

I shuddered at 11.00 am to see Roland Martin wet his cheeks on CNN. I could only wonder what went to the mind of the black people in their 60s, who on 40 years ago marched alongside Martin Luther King to fight for their civil rights. And to later learn that 65 million people had voted for him. That he won at least 368 electoral votes now where only 270 were required to win it. Has Martin Luther King’s dream come to pass? That his sons “will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their characters?”

I remembered a passage from that comic book “Eagle” that is now antiquated. Someone repudiated a fictional senator ‘Yamaoka,’ saying “there has never been a -ski or a -stein as presidents, the weirdest they can come up with was Eisenhower.” And here we are, with a president Barack Obama.

Barack. Hussein. Obama.

A man who 8 years ago could not enter the Democratic Convention. A man who 8 years ago had his credit card rejected. A man who just paid his college loan 5 years ago. A man without connection like the Kennedy’s or the Bush’s or the Clinton’s or Rockefeller’s. A man barely serving in the Senate for 2 years before he campaigned.

Here’s what he was up against: a well oiled Clinton political machine with a candidate everybody presumes will win the candidacy - a candidate that happened to be the former First Lady that everyone in the nation knew already. Aside from that, he was against a white man who was a veteran and POW and a senator for 26 years.

And all this is not from a Michael Crichton book or a Hollywood movie or a Japanese comic book. They’re reality, and it happened.

Right now I do not know how president Barack Obama will perform. I don’t know if he is going to be a polarizing figure who will get nothing done, or whether he will be just alright, or whether people will want his likeness to be carved on Mount Rushmore. Expectations of him is terribly high as he has to fix a myriad of mounting problems in front of him - economy in tatters, two wars, global climate changing for the worse, challenges from rising nations, energy problems, and so on. But his accomplishment in winning the highest office in the United States is a fantastical, historical, and dramatic story in itself that we should relish.

Congratulations, President Elect Barack Hussein Obama II. Our eyes will be on you as you perform, while we wonder when a figure like you will appaer in our political scene.