Think of America however you wish – as the land of opportunity, as the greatest leader of the free world – but understand that at our core we are a bipolar nation dominated by factional lunatics with the moral characteristics of amoebas. We have presidents and senators who sleep around, mayors who do drugs, and state officials who accept bribes in exchange for political appointments. We spend trillions of dollars more than we have while forcing large corporations that do the same into bankruptcy courts for the alleged welfare of the American workforce.
We claim to be the melting pot of the world but in my opinion we aren’t conching hard enough to get every citizen properly tempered.
This may not be the overwhelming reason why John Jones and Muhammed Morley McNamara don’t get along very well but it certainly contributes to their daily counteractions. I’m afraid that billing ourselves as the most successful non-homogeneous nation on earth does not make it even remotely so.
Take a look at the political discourse this past week over President Obama’s back-to-school speech: a simple exercise in motivational speaking, originally flavored with some political spice called “the president’s education plan.” It wasn’t the first student-oriented speech to be delivered by a president but it was the first such speech delivered by the current president. Read between the lines of protest from the morally White – er, Right – and you can see the drop-shadow that states, “no son of mine is going to take his education cues from a Black man.”
The easiest way to make this prejudice palatable to a mixed nation is, as usual, to present it in political wrapping paper accented by a partisan-colored bow. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty felt the speech would be “disruptive” on the first day of school. Some uninformed woman named Shaneen Barron told the Denver CNN affiliate that she was offended by the thought of the president addressing her children. Even the universally effervescent (not) Newt Gingrich got in on the action by warning, more than stating, that the speech would be acceptable if it [only] provided positive reinforcement to stay in school and study hard.
In the silliest response to a presidential address I’ve seen yet, our elected officials and average citizens took umbrage at Obama’s initial plan to ask students to write a letter to him outlining their education goals for the year. If this was the Grammy Awards, with Taylor Swift making the very same request, there would have been applause wild enough to shake the dust from the rafters – everyone in the audience would have been on their feet and cheering. But no, this was only the president, the most powerful man on earth, who has no business holding the students of his nation to a higher academic standard. Dubyah would have fared better, scary as that may seem.
We are still so bigoted that we can’t find our way to common ground on something as critical as the education of our kids. With no respect for Obama’s office or his personal educational background we slapped his hand because it wanted to reach out to a nation where the high school drop out rate is close to 10%. We wouldn’t have minded if he sat his daughters down and gave them this speech but we really wouldn’t want him talking like this to our children. Forget that other presidents have done the same thing…this guy’s name is Barack Hussein and he’s not qualified to speak to the White – er, Right.
Maybe we’ll think differently on things if we can ever clear up that “issue” of his being a native-born U.S. citizen. Until then, it appears the amoebas are very proud of their doing the unbiased job of electing America’s first African American president to office but they’re sure as hell not ready to have him do anything – like inspire the youth of the nation – while there.
