BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)

Subject: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: Midchuck
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 10:09 AM

Well, it is a sort of music-related...a little...

Tom Russell's Blog.

Peter

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: katlaughing
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 11:31 AM

Well-said, Tom!

As far as Christian Right Wing Conservatives, they not only shot themselves in both feet, they destroyed so called Republican Evangelical Christian Conservatism (as a political force) for decades to come, and probably forever.

May it be so!!

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: Art Thieme
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 01:06 PM

Our son Chris, his wife, Kat, and his family (2 daughters and infant son) went to the rally in Grant Park - Chicago -- to learn the election results and to celebrate the victory of Barack Obama. This is what he wrote about the experience:

"I held my four-year-old daughter hovering above the pee-speckled porta-potty seat. "Don't pee on dad," I warned her, and the crowd erupted.Outside, the Jumbotrons displayed what we had all come to see. Barack Obama was the next president of the United States. There is something truly symbolic in that moment, in that place. Grant Park, 40 years later, and the pendulum swings toward hope. The basic needs of family outweigh whatever might be transpiring in the world, but to be there at that moment within the city of my father's father as my four month old son slept on my wife's chest could not be matched by any livingroom, any bar, anywhere else in the world. I didn't want to go all that way from Lake County after work, but my wife insisted, packed sandwiches and juice boxes, and we were off. And when my grandchildren ask, "Where were you when...?" I'll have a great story to embarrass their mother with!

Art Thieme

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: Amos
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 01:52 PM

My wife stood, slack-jawed, staring at the eruption of cheers, tears, amaze, and general vociferous elation as the call came down for Obama. She shook her head, disbelieving, tears in her eyes.

"The Civil War is over." she announced.

A day later several pundits, after due consideration at their keyboards, echoed her phrase. But hers came from the moment and from the heart.

Next to her, our dear friend Nancy wept quietly.

As the various pundits started chiming off with comments about the racial milestone, her husband Peter blew his top.

"It's not about RACE, you assholes!!", he yelled at the television.

"It's about BRILLIANCE!!!"

But we all had tears in our eyes, and for many, it was about race--not race itself, of course, but about the negation of race and the lowest demons of our natures that had been conquered that night.

Brilliant, indeed.

And it was one night I will never forget, as vividly etched in memory as the morning of November 22, 1963, when the nation reeled over news ten times as shocking, and far, far less hopeful. ANd in a sense, that morning in 1963 was healed last Tuesday evening.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: Alice
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 02:07 PM

I was isolated, alone, in a rented cabin in the country where I was working on the road. The TV had 3 channels, very fuzzy reception, and I kept clicking around trying to follow the results. When it finally came, I had to call my two oldest friends and my son to have someone to share the joy with. I had bought a little bottle of champagne earlier in the day and cracked it open to celebrate. In the 24 hours that followed, I realized that I have been depressed for 8 years under Bush, a feeling of hopelessness over me. The next morning after the election, I woke up with a new sense of beginnings, optimism and a "lightness of being".

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: katlaughing
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 02:21 PM

Bill Moyers was wonderful, last night. All the tears came flooding back at his eloquence and how well he expressed where we've been and where we now are.

Video is HERE.

Here is the transcript, but I urge you to go to the video link just to look at the photo he is talking about:

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.

"Here at the end of this watershed week, one photograph keeps playing in my mind, and I want to share it with you. It's from an Obama rally in St. Louis, Missouri, a couple of weeks ago —100,000 people.

"Now look more closely at the background, at that old building with a copper dome turned green with age. That used to be the courthouse where slaves were auctioned from the steps. In 1846, Dred Scott and his wife Harriett, both slaves, went there to appeal to the court for their freedom. They said they had been living in states and territories where slavery was outlawed and so should be let go.

"They were, briefly, but soon were returned to slavery. When their appeal reached the United States Supreme Court, 11 years later, Chief Justice Roger Taney refused to free them. He ruled that slaves did not have the rights of citizens because Harriet and Dred Scott were, quote, "Beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

"You know the storm that followed —civil war, Lincoln's assassination, the failure of reconstruction, Jim Crow, white supremacy, lynching. So much blood shed, so much suffering, so many martyrs.

"My grandchildren have a hard time understanding the America I try to describe to them from my own childhood in East Texas. Across the Deep South whites still resolved to keep blacks in their place, often with a holy fervor.

"Above all they were determined to keep blacks from voting, voting meant equality —power. When black veterans coming home from fighting for their country, tried to register, they were assaulted and arrested. In South Carolina one black soldier riding the bus home after 15 months in the South Pacific, angered the driver with some minor act that struck the white man as uppity. At the next stop the veteran was taken off the bus by the local chief of police and beaten so badly he went blind. The police chief was put on trial and acquitted, to the cheers of the courtroom.

"In one Georgia county the only black to vote had also just come home from the war. As he sat on his porch the day after the primary, he was shot and killed, and a sign posted on a nearby black church boasted: "The first nigger to vote will never vote again."

"Signs like that did not come down easily. It would take Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma. It would take the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and countless individual acts of heroism. And it would take, finally, take someone like Barack Obama, who, if he had been born a generation earlier, could have been lynched for the audacity of hope, but who now saw that America was changing, is changing, has changed, and that he might be the agent for lifting from around our necks this great stone from the past, by refusing himself to be haunted or ruled by it.

"He will of course disappoint; all presidents do —and the first black president will be no more exempt from reality and human nature than the 43 white men who came before him. We don't know what he will do in office. He has promised that he will take us "there" without saying what "there" entails, or what hard choices must be made. We shall see.

"But that is ahead of us. For now, it is only right that we remember how long it has taken to get here, and the price paid by so many to bring us this far. The reality of it hit me late in the week as I read in the "San Francisco Chronicle" of a woman named Johnnie Marie Ross. Forty years ago, in 1968, she was 19, and the mother of two, and she was shattered by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. To cope with her pain she wrote a poem:

"'So rest in peace in the name of the father and the son, for your dream has not ended but in reality just begun.'

"When she read her poem aloud at a local church service, young black people from the neighborhood passed the collection plate and sent her to Dr. King's funeral in Atlanta. "He was our everything," she told the "Chronicle" reporters. "He was our hope for the future." But after his death, she said, "We were afraid... like we would be killed if we stood up."

"That was 40 years ago. Johnnie Marie Ross, now 59, says she has lived in fear ever since. No more. On Tuesday she voted and walked home with a flag in her hand and a song on her lips. Hallelujah, she sang, over and over. Hallelujah.

All the way home."

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 03:43 PM

I would imagine there are two kinds of Republican in the wake of this election.   

One sort would of course feel disappointed at the result, but would see the fact that America has elected a black candidate as a consolation, something to soften the blow. The same way I hope that most Democrats would have felt, if the boot had been on the other foot, and say Condoleezza Rice had been elected President.

And the other sort would be those who would see Obama's colour as something that made the loss even worse. And they are the one's you need to watch out for.

The good thing about McCain's concession speech, and Bush's response as well, is that they pretty clearly indicated they fell into the former category.

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: Melissa
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 05:04 PM

My personal best thought (so far) was when I suddenly realized we might not have to be 'dumbed down' anymore. We've got a Leader who actually LIKES Americans and wants us to be involved because he thinks we're worth the effort.

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: Amos
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 05:12 PM

Kat:

Thanks so much for the Moyers link.

He has a flair for telling it like it is.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: Charley Noble
Date: 09 Nov 08 - 05:04 PM

Just let the waves of this victory wash over me!

It's so nice to think of all the African-Americans I have worked with over the years taking satisfaction in this victory.

Cheerily,
Charley Noble

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 09 Nov 08 - 05:23 PM

I'd have thought that the sense of relief that they live in a country where a black man can be elected president would be shared by most Americans. Probably the overwhelming majority, hopefully including most of those who voted for McCain.

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: DougR
Date: 09 Nov 08 - 07:27 PM

Amos: "Telling like it is"? I would add to that, "as he sees it."

The color of Obama's skin had nothing to do with my voting for McCain instead of him. I voted against his left-wing political philosophy.

DougR

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: Charley Noble
Date: 09 Nov 08 - 09:48 PM

Doug-

Are these your best thoghts?

I will be surprised to see any manifestation of "left-wing political philosophy" from Obama, but I would welcome it if it were manifest.

What really alarmed you?

And why weren't you alarmed at a "maverick" Republican who was willing to go "hard right" to get elected?

Charley Noble

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 09 Nov 08 - 09:57 PM

So am I right to assume, as I do, that Doug is among "the overwhelming majority, hopefully including most of those who voted for McCain" who would feel that sense of relief that now they know for sure they live in a country where a black man can be elected president? And the rest of the world knows it as well.

Along with John McCain himself, as he seemed to indicate in his gracious concession speech.

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: Peace
Date: 09 Nov 08 - 09:58 PM

Amos,

IMO, that is the most beautiful post you ever made on Mudcat.

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: Amos
Date: 09 Nov 08 - 10:31 PM

Gracias, amigo.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: katlaughing
Date: 09 Nov 08 - 11:58 PM

I thought he did, too, Amos. You're welcome.

Art, what a thrill that must've been for Chris and Kat; I know the kids won't remember it, but they will learn the story and retell. How wonderful and Chris has such a way of putting it!:-)

Doug, please take the bickering to another thread. This one asked for your best thoughts. I think you can do better.

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: Folkiedave
Date: 10 Nov 08 - 11:08 AM

On a personal note and speaking from the UK I played Finest Kind's version of Dylan's "Times they are a Changin'" in a sort of homage to Obama's victory - on Satruday night I went to see Finest Kind and they ended their concert with it and for exactly the same reason.

But I sure as hell wished I had been in Chicago that night......

Subject: RE: BS: Best Thoughts re: Election (IMO)
From: Barry Finn
Date: 10 Nov 08 - 09:00 PM

It was also nice to know we'll have a president who respects intelligence, science no longer has to take a back seat like it ahs for the past 8 yrs. Actually I was just so pleased to finally hear someone who's heading for the top office make sense & speak clearly for a change, I missed that, espically when Bush talked to other world leaders, what an embrassment.

Barry