Post Election Commentary

Post Election Commentary

Lanny Davis, who is a stalwart liberal but is not as radical as some, posited an interesting thought a day or so after the election results were in.  He said that Obama is no longer in need of pandering to his base and may move further to the middle in his second term.  It would be nice if it would be so but I’m not confident that will be.  I’m reading Dreams From My Father.  With so much that is happening, I can’t get around to reading the second half of the book.  I’ll write a post for Facebook about it when I’m done.  If Davis reads that book he might begin to believe that Obama has greater ambitions than just wanting to be president. 

There are five chapters about Chicago.  I’m through them and am now in the chapter on Kenya.     At the very beginning of the first Chicago chapter you see that he has dreams of radically changing the political landscape.  He has dreams of lighting a fire under a very lethargic black community in Chicago and trying to get them to rise up against the town fathers to bring about better living conditions for the people in the ghettos.  As you read on through the Chicago chapters you see that the Columbia student is so driven to go into community organizing that he actually resigns from a good paying job to pursue that interest.  He also turned down a “generous offer” from another company.  The charismatic young college student is very much in demand among business people that know him.  He s actually flat broke about six months after he turns his back on the offers that could give him a comfortable life-style but he’s so driven to turn the world inside out that he’s willing to suffer the deprivation.  Women friends that are with him in the organization he’s trying to put together ask him questions like, “What are you doing here when you could be basking in the sun on the beaches of Hawaii?”  According to this book that he’s the author of,  Obama did not have an impoverished life-style as he was being brought up by his mother and very doting maternal grandparents; mostly in Hawaii and a few years in Indonesia.  His mother had a good paying government job.  There’s much to report.  I’ll save it for when I get done with the book.  He has ambitions that are not good and he shows a bitterness of being a black man living in a white man’s world.  He shows this preoccupation throughout the approximate 250 pages I have so far read through.  Anyone reading Dreams From My Father should expect the autobiography to be an almost total preoccupation with race.  The very title cover of the book is sub –titled A Story of Race and Inheritance.  There’s a lot going on behind that happy outgoing demeanor.  One of the things he mentions is what he has learned from hearing about “Rules for Radicals.”  He says words to the effect that you do not win friends and influence people exuding an angry countenance.  He says whites are attracted to blacks that are smiling and happy.  In chapter eleven he talks of a conversation he’s having with his half-sister, Auma, who has come from Kenya to visit him and stay with him for a few days.  He talks of a white girl friend he had that he was very fond of but was getting more and more apprehensive about getting too serious with.  He says, “I realized that our two world’s, my friend’s and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany.  (Auma had a boyfriend in Germany that could lead to marriage but she was not keen on living in Germany) And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in her’s.  After all, I’d been doing it all my life.  Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.”    

In the very beginning of Chapter seven the twenty-two year old Barack Obama talks of deciding to become a community organizer:  “I didn’t know anyone making a living that way.  When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly.  Instead I just pronounced on the need for change.  Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds.  Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt.  Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed.  Change won’t come from the top, I would say.  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.”        

I was adding my prayers to the novenas Catholic Bishops were guiding their congregations through nationwide that we’d get a pro-life administration and one that would foster religious freedom but I was never losing sight that it might be God’s will to bring about a chastisement on this country for the way so many of the masses are sinking lower and lower into the depths of a depraved culture.  Nothing happens that God doesn’t want to let happen.

“But my people would not listen to me;

Israel would not submit to me.

So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts

to follow their own devices.” Psalm 81:11-12