Dear President-Elect Obama:
First, let me convey my joy at your amazing victory last night. I was one of the students involved in the Civil Rights movement in the early 60's. I could never understand bigotry -- to me it semed to be the ultimate sign of ignorance.
But now, you've done the impossible, creating a coalition of hope and peace, bringing generations together from young, enthusiastic first-time voters to elderly people who have lived a lifetime hoping against hope that this kind of victory would happen one day. I am blessed to have survived through several cancer battles -- I believe I was spared to see this day.
I am truly sorry that your grandmother did not live to see your incredible victory, but I believe she is watching your family's (and the nation's) joy from heaven.
May God keep you and your beautiful family safe and sound and far from harm's way. You are the hope of America's and the world's future.
I'm aghast at the methods that the McCain/Palin campaign has been using, but I'm also surprised that Senator Biden made one of his famous gaffes about Obama being tested within six months after he is voted into office.True, it's similar to what turncoat Joe Lieberman uttered at a Republican fundraiser, but there was no reason to put words in John McCain's mouth. Please, Senator Biden, think first, speak second! It's taken me a long time to follow that advice, but I've found it to be quite expedient.
Let's hope that the intelligence, calm demeanor and logic of Obama is seen by all voters. I'm giving a prayer for both Obama and his beloved grandmother to get through this current health crisis, all the way to Election day, when she will be able to see the results of her love and guidance.
Although I live in a Northeastern "blue state," I'm also smack dab in the middle of an ultra-conservative, right-wing conservative faction. The usual efforts to reach a lot of these voters have barely worked so far, so I've come up with a new strategy.
The local supermarkets are carrying two of the "hate" books against Obama, including Corsi's pack of lies -- with nary an Obama book on the shelves. Whenever I make a trip to the supermarket I make it a point to meet with whichever manager is on duty and complain about the obvious preference for the anti-Obama books and complain about the lack of Obama's own books.
Although the smear books are still on the shelves, at least they've brought back the Obama books. I can't swear that these local conservatives will purchase them, but at least they are out there in plain sight. If you see this, take a few moments to make your feelings knwn.
My family and I are horrified by the smear campaign conducted by Hillary Clinton. She has blown Obama's remarks out of proportion because she is frightened that the Clinton machine is not automatically granting her the Democratic nomination. I can almost understand McCain's response, but Mrs. Clinton's remarks just echo John McCain's rhetoric.
I for one am more committed to backing Barack Obama's bid for the nomination and eventual Presidency. He is the only one who can bring our country out of the Bush & Company mess and bring back respect for America abroad and overseas. He is a scholar and a thoughtful man who has committed his life to serve the betterment of others, first in his Chicago community, then in the Senator and now hopefully, he will serve as President.
While I'm not making phone calls or sending post cards, I'm "campaigning" for Barack Obama in my own way. I wear my Obama buttons every day and when I see someone in the grocery store, the doctor's office, the park or the library, I try to get a read from the expression on their faces.
When I get a "never!" meaning they would not vote for Obama, I always go one step further and ask why. The most common objections are:
1) the middle name Hussein. I usually answer that Hussein was Obama's father's name and that while his father was Muslim, he is a devout Christian. I also add that although Hillary says she would have left a church where her minister had done wrong, she didn't leave her husband when he committed adultery (in the Oval office, of all places).
2) There is also a question about him not saluting the flag. I insist that he has always saluted the flag -- just that he didn't do it while singing the national athem -- which one doesn't have to do.
Does anyone have any other suggestions to temper these objections?
-Seeking advice
This is an e-mail that I sent to my friends and family this morning:
I know that some of you do not support Senator Obama's run for President. However, I just heard his impassioned, fervent and intelligent answers to the recent Rev. Wright scandal and I must admit, I pray that this country has a President of such intelligence, compassion and strength -- a President who has seen both sides -- being raised by a white compassionate mother and white grandparents who were caught up in their own generation and being the son, albeit an absentee son, of an African black man.I must also admit that I cried when he spoke about Rev. Wright's growing up in a time of extreme prejudice and racial hatred. I identified with that -- completely -- and have worked hard all of my life to overcome the racial, religious and ethnic hatred that is tearing America apart. I see such promise in Obama -- such honesty and such integrity. I also see a man that will not completely repudiate a man who took the place of a father figure, but has the compassion to understand the hatred beneath the surface.We shall overcome someday. Let's hope it's sooner than later.
Many of you probably saw the lead story on the front page of today’s New York Time. If you did not get a chance to read it this morning, I highly recommend you take a moment to do so now. Barack’s mother seems like a truly unique and gifted individual and I feel his loss simply by reading this brief story about her.
March 14, 2008
The Long Run A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path By JANNY SCOTTIn the capsule version of the Barack Obama story, his mother is simply the white woman from Kansas. The phrase comes coupled alliteratively to its counterpart, the black father from Kenya. On the campaign trail, he has called her his “single mom.” But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Mr. Obama.
Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor.She had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 a.m. for correspondence courses in English before school; she brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And when Mr. Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart — a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in Ms. Soetoro’s life.“She felt that somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s half-sister. “That was very much her philosophy of life — to not be limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places.”Ms. Soetoro, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, was the parent who raised Mr. Obama, the Illinois senator running for the Democratic presidential nomination. He barely saw his father after the age of 2.
Though it is impossible to pinpoint the imprint of a parent on the life of a grown child, people who knew Ms. Soetoro well say they see her influence unmistakably in Mr. Obama.They were close, her friends and his half-sister say, though they spent much of their lives with oceans or continents between them. He would not be where he is today, he has said, had it not been for her. Yet he has also made some different choices — marrying into a tightly knit African-American family rooted in the South Side of Chicago, becoming a churchgoing Christian, publicly recounting his search for his identity as a black man.Some of what he has said about his mother seems tinged with a mix of love and regret. He has said his biggest mistake was not being at her bedside when she died. And when The Associated Press asked the candidates about “prized keepsakes” — others mentioned signed baseballs, a pocket watch, a “trophy wife” — Mr. Obama said his was a photograph of the cliffs of the South Shore of Oahu in Hawaii where his mother’s ashes were scattered.“I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book — less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life,” he wrote in the preface to his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” He added, “I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.”
In a campaign in which Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has made liberal use of his globe-trotting 96-year-old mother to answer suspicions that he might be an antique at 71, Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, invokes his mother’s memory sparingly. In one television advertisement, she appears fleetingly — porcelain-skinned, raven-haired and holding her toddler son. “My mother died of cancer at 53,” he says in the ad, which focuses on health care. “In those last painful months, she was more worried about paying her medical bills than getting well.”‘A Very, Very Big Thinker’He has described her as a teenage mother, a single mother, a mother who worked, went to school and raised children at the same time. He has credited her with giving him a great education and confidence in his ability to do the right thing. But, in interviews, friends and colleagues of Ms. Soetoro shed light on a side of her that is less well known.“She was a very, very big thinker,” said Nancy Barry, a former president of Women’s World Banking, an international network of microfinance providers, where Ms. Soetoro worked in New York City in the early 1990s. “I think she was not at all personally ambitious, I think she cared about the core issues, and I think she was not afraid to speak truth to power.”Her parents were from Kansas — her mother from Augusta, her father from El Dorado, a place Mr. Obama first visited in a campaign stop in January. Stanley Ann (her father wanted a boy so he gave her his name) was born on an Army base during World War II. The family moved to California, Kansas, Texas and Washington in restless pursuit of opportunity before landing in Honolulu in 1960.In a Russian class at the University of Hawaii, she met the college’s first African student, Barack Obama. They married and had a son in August 1961, in an era when interracial marriage was rare in the United States. Her parents were upset, Senator Obama learned years later from his mother, but they adapted. “I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me,” the senator’s grandmother told an interviewer several years ago.The marriage was brief. In 1963, Mr. Obama left for Harvard, leaving his wife and child. She then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student. When he was summoned home in 1966 after the turmoil surrounding the rise of Suharto, Ms. Soetoro and Barack followed.
Those choices were not entirely surprising, said several high school friends of Ms. Soetoro, whom they remembered as unusually intelligent, curious and open. She never dated “the crew-cut white boys,” said one friend, Susan Blake: “She had a world view, even as a young girl. It was embracing the different, rather than that ethnocentric thing of shunning the different. That was where her mind took her.”Her second marriage faded, too, in the 1970s. Ms. Soetoro wanted to work, one friend said, and Mr. Soetoro wanted more children. He became more American, she once said, as she became more Javanese. “There’s a Javanese belief that if you’re married to someone and it doesn’t work, it will make you sick,” said Alice G. Dewey, an anthropologist and friend. “It’s just stupid to stay married.”That both unions ended is beside the point, some friends suggested. Ms. Soetoro remained loyal to both husbands and encouraged her children to feel connected to their fathers. (In reading drafts of her son’s memoir, Mr. Obama has said, she did not comment upon his depiction of her but was “quick to explain or defend the less flattering aspects of my father’s character.”)“She always felt that marriage as an institution was not particularly essential or important,” said Nina Nayar, who later became a close friend of Ms. Soetoro. What mattered to her, Ms. Nayar said, was to have loved deeply.By 1974, Ms. Soetoro was back in Honolulu, a graduate student and raising Barack and Maya, nine years younger. Barack was on scholarship at a prestigious prep school, Punahou. When Ms. Soetoro decided to return to Indonesia three years later for her field work, Barack chose not to go.“I doubted what Indonesia now had to offer and wearied of being new all over again,” he wrote in his memoir. “More than that, I’d arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they’d leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight.” During those years, he was “engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America.” Ms. Soetoro-Ng recalled her mother’s quandary. “She wanted him to be with her,” Ms. Soetoro-Ng said. But she added: “Although it was painful to be separated from him for his last four years of high school, she recognized that it was perhaps the best thing for him. And she had to go to Indonesia at that time.”That time apart was hard for both mother and son.“She longed for him,” said Georgia McCauley, who became a friend of Ms. Soetoro in Jakarta. Barack spent summers and Christmas vacations with his mother; they communicated by letters, his illustrated with cartoons. Her first topic of conversation was always her son, her female friends said. As for him, he was grappling with questions of racial identity, alienation and belonging.
“There were certainly times in his life in those four years when he could have used her presence on a more daily basis,” Ms. Soetoro-Ng said. “But I think he did all right for himself.”Fluent in Indonesian, Ms. Soetoro moved with Maya first to Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese handicrafts. A weaver in college, she was fascinated with what Ms. Soetoro-Ng calls “life’s gorgeous minutiae.” That interest inspired her study of village industries, which became the basis of her 1992 doctoral dissertation.“She loved living in Java,” said Dr. Dewey, who recalled accompanying Ms. Soetoro to a metalworking village. “People said: ‘Hi! How are you?’ She said: ‘How’s your wife? Did your daughter have the baby?’ They were friends. Then she’d whip out her notebook and she’d say: ‘How many of you have electricity? Are you having trouble getting iron?’ ” She became a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development on setting up a village credit program, then a Ford Foundation program officer in Jakarta specializing in women’s work. Later, she was a consultant in Pakistan, then joined Indonesia’s oldest bank to work on what is described as the world’s largest sustainable microfinance program, creating services like credit and savings for the poor.Visitors flowed constantly through her Ford Foundation office in downtown Jakarta and through her house in a neighborhood to the south, where papaya and banana trees grew in the front yard and Javanese dishes like opor ayam were served for dinner. Her guests were leaders in the Indonesian human rights movement, people from women’s organizations, representatives of community groups doing grass-roots development.“I didn’t know a lot of them and would often ask after, ‘Who was that?’ ” said David S. McCauley, now an environmental economist at the Asian Development Bank in Manila, who had the office next door. “You’d find out it was the head of some big organization in with thousands of members from central Java or someplace, somebody that she had met some time ago, and they would make a point of coming to see her when they came to Jakarta.”
As a mother, Ms. Soetoro was both idealistic and exacting. Friends describe her as variously informal and intense, humorous and hardheaded. She preached to her young son the importance of honesty, straight talk, independent judgment. When he balked at her early-morning home schooling, she retorted, “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”When Barack was in high school, she confronted him about his seeming lack of ambition, Mr. Obama wrote. He could get into any college in the country, she told him, with just a little effort. (“Remember what that’s like? Effort?”) He says he looked at her, so earnest and sure of his destiny: “I suddenly felt like puncturing that certainty of hers, letting her know that her experiment with me had failed.”Ms. Soetoro-Ng, who herself became an anthropologist, remembers conversations with her mother about philosophy or politics, books, esoteric Indonesian woodworking motifs. One Christmas in Indonesia, Ms. Soetoro found a scrawny tree and decorated it with red and green chili peppers and popcorn balls.“She gave us a very broad understanding of the world,” her daughter said. “She hated bigotry. She was very determined to be remembered for a life of service and thought that service was really the true measure of a life.” Many of her friends see her legacy in Mr. Obama — in his self-assurance and drive, his boundary bridging, even his apparent comfort with strong women. Some say she changed them, too.“I feel she taught me how to live,” said Ms. Nayar, who was in her 20s when she met Ms. Soetoro at Women’s World Banking. “She was not particularly concerned about what society would say about working women, single women, women marrying outside their culture, women who were fearless and who dreamed big.”The Final MonthsAfter her diagnosis, Ms. Soetoro spent the last months of her life in Hawaii, near her mother. (Her father had died.) Mr. Obama has recalled talking with her in her hospital bed about her fears of ending up broke. She was not ready to die, he has said. Even so, she helped him and Maya “push on with our lives, despite our dread, our denials, our sudden constrictions of the heart.”She died in November 1995, as Mr. Obama was starting his first campaign for public office. After a memorial service at the University of Hawaii, one friend said, a small group of friends drove to the South Shore in Oahu. With the wind whipping the waves onto the rocks, Mr. Obama and Ms. Soetoro-Ng placed their mother’s ashes in the Pacific, sending them off in the direction of Indonesia.
This is a post I wrote on a different board, a few months ago, but the need for change still applies:
Latest Travesty of JusticeYesterday marked a new low in American history. Our non-illustrious leader, aka The Smirking Chimp, aka Junior Bush, aka Dubya, took the time to pardon drug dealers and smugglers while ignoring the pleas of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, two Border Patrol agents who will be serving time for just doing their jobs. Neither should have been charged with carrying weapons, necessary to fulfill their responsibilities, nor with apprehending a known drug smuggler, Osvaldo Davila who was shot in the buttocks when he refused to halt and escaped back to Mexico. I cannot believe this is happening to two courageous men who worked to protect their country. The prosecution of these men is disgraceful.Amazingly, the list of Bush's recent pardons includes the seamiest, most flagrant drug dealers in the country, including a pardon for meth dealer, Phillip Anthony Emmert. The street buzz is, Bush knew their parents with whom he did business in the past (some of Bush's history of substance abuse is a matter of public record). Perhaps the Shrub's fried brain has tempered some of his decisions of the past six years, namely, the decision to invade Iraq and his congratulating "Brownie" of FEMA for the "good job" he did after the deluge called Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans is still in ruins while Junior chops wood in Texas.I'm not against Mexicans who want to better themselves as I'm the child of immigrants who came here legally and had to meet stringent requirements to become citizens. I'm against the severe injustice that sends border agents to jail for doing the right thing -- trying to curtail the activities of a drug trafficking criminal.This is an American tragedy of immense proportions. The details of this injustice are beyond stupidity. Something is very rotten in Texas and it stinks all the way to the White House. Interesting footnote: Johnny Sutton, the prosecutor in the case is a dear friend of president (small p) of George W. Bush.
