Dreams From
My Father--Second Commentary
I am now at
page 140 in President Obama’s book, Dreams
From My Father. I’ll write of my
impressions so far as I try to get into the mind of the man and see what makes
him tick.
Chapter 7,
Chicago, starts, “In 1983 (22 years old) I decided to be a community
organizer….” He talks about his
bitterness of what’s going on in the country and his animus toward, “….Reagan
and his minions carrying on their dirty deeds.”…. “Change will come from a
mobilized grass roots. That’s what I’ll
do, I’ll organize black folks at the grass roots. For change.”
Skipping
ahead a couple of pages O writes, “Eventually a consulting house to
multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived
every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal….” After a half dozen pages into the Chicago
chapter he relates that he resigned from the firm “…and began looking in
earnest for an organizing job.”
A month
later one of the companies he turned his resume’ into called him in for an
interview. He had a disdainful reaction
to the plushly furnished corporate office of the director who was very impressed
with the
young Columbia College student. The
director was especially impressed that he had corporate experience. He offered Barack the job right on the
spot. It involved organizing conferences
on drugs, unemployment, housing. But
Barack declined his “generous offer.” He
wanted to get a job closer to the streets.
After about
six months and being flat broke, he received a call from Marty Kaufman. He started an organizing drive in Chicago and
was looking for a trainee. They arranged
to meet at a coffee shop a week later on Lexington Avenue. O said, “His appearance didn’t inspire much
confidence.” He described him as being a
white man of medium height wearing a rumpled suit over a pudgy frame and having
two day old whiskers, behind a pair of thick wire rimmed glasses and his eyes
seemed to be set in a perpetual squint.
The man
opened their conversation: “‘So,’ Marty
said, ‘Why does somebody from Hawaii want to be an organizer?’” After Barack answered him, this
followed: “‘Hmmph,’ he nodded, taking
notes on a dog-eared legal pad. ‘You
must be angry about something.’”
“‘What do
you mean by that?’”
“He
shrugged. ‘I don’t know what
exactly. But something. Don’t get me wrong – anger’s a requirement
for the job. The only reason anybody
decides to be an organizer. Well
adjusted people find more relaxing work.’”
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I came to
the conclusion a long time ago that people with an inferiority complex that
come into positions of power can be dangerous.
You wouldn’t think of Obama as having an inferiority complex with all
that he has going for him but when you read this book you see every so
often that he’s having an identity crisis. Everything is seen through the prism of
race. Here’s a passage in an earlier
part of the book:
Speaking of
his Occidental freshman classmate, Joyce, he says, “One day I asked her if she
was going to the Black Students’ Association meeting. She looked at me funny, then started shaking
her head like a baby who doesn’t want what it sees on the spoon.
(O describes
Joyce as being a good looking woman with green eyes and honey skin and pouty
lips “and all the brothers were after her.”)
‘I’m not
black,’ Joyce said. ‘I’m multiracial.’ Then she started telling me about her
father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and
her mother, who happened to be part African and part French and part Native
American and part something else. ‘Why
should I have to choose between them?’ she asked me. Her voice cracked and I thought she was going
to cry. ‘It’s not white people who are
making me choose. Maybe it used to be
that way, but now they’re willing to treat me as a person. No—it’s black
people who always have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose. They’re the ones who are telling me I can’t
be who I am….’
They, they,
they. That was the problem with people
like Joyce. They talk about the richness
of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed
that they avoided black people.”
Did Joyce’s
freshman classmate hear anything she said?
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You see in
reading this book why it is that you hear speeches like the one candidate Obama
made in 2007 following Katrina. Fox News
repeated once again on the Harris Faulkner show Friday night October 5th
that the Candidate running for the presidency in 2007 was not exactly telling
it like it was when he charged that the Bush Administration was neglecting to
come to the aid of the people in New Orleans that needed the government’s
help. Faulkner once again reported that
the Stafford law WAS suspended ten days before Obama made that speech, opening
the way for the government to send forty billion dollars for recovery aid to
Louisiana. He knew the government sent
that aid. But Obama deals in
perceptions. He knows his blind
followers do not pay a lot of attention to what is going on and they’ll believe
anything he tells them.
You feel
that when you read the part of the book I just came through that Obama can’t
just see himself as a colorless American dedicated to the great nation God-guided
founders gave us. No, it’s as if he
feels he’s a victim of being a black man in a white man’s world. You get the feeling he has a score he wants
to settle.
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