by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
I must say that I am having serious problems here, though not with the speech but with the controversy that has been going on as regards this speech before it even ever was made.
Too many people on the right of the American political spectrum just are not prepared to even listen to President Obama.
Why not? As this is a rhetorical question I will also give you an answer here and that is a very easy one: The reason is racism, pure and simple, and primarily because Barak Obama is neither African-American proper mixed with White – for he is of an East African father and an American mother. The first problem seems for people that he is – and I beg the President's pardon here – half-caste and in addition to that the Black side does not come from the slavery part of African-Americans.
The United States is still in the same grip of racism that it was in always. Nothing has changed really, especially not in a great majority of States other then those on the East coast and maybe California.
There was not a single controversial passage, sentence or even word in the entire speech, for I had the pleasure to watch it live via a feed from the Whitehouse.
There had been talks even amongst all those claims made prior to the speech being aired even that students were going to have to give a pledge to the President and such like. None of this was the case.
Now the claim of the right is that the text was changed quickly before it was then released onto the website of the Whitehouse on Labor Day.
Those people are much like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons who, whenever their predictions do not come true, change tack and have excuses, like when the JW's predicted that Jesus would return in the early 20th century and when that did not happen then the excuse was that he changed his mind to give more people a chance to come over to Him. Oh dear!
And we are seeing the same now here and I am sure we have seen this before and are going to continue to see it. Now they claim the text was changed in a hurry. Never just a possibility that they, the right wind, might have been wrong.
But wrong they were nevertheless and have been in so many ways, and I am referring here to the like of Glen Beck, Alex Jones of “prisonplanet.com” and other of their ilk.
The biggest problem seem to me, as I have said already, that Barak Obama can try as hard as he will he will never be able to do anything right in the eyes of those people and the primary reason for their rejection of him is the fact that he is a man of color, in their eyes.
The speech the President made to the school students of America should be repeated also to school children in Britain for we have the same problems with lethargy, drop out rates, truancy and violence and bad behavior in school.
It was such a shame though to see that even in that audience at the school in Arlington, VA, there were so many students, primarily of certain ethnic backgrounds, that expressed total disinterest in the President's words by means of their very expressions.
The President mentioned many of the issues that cause this such as the home environment where children may not, like we know with many Romani-Gypsy parents, receive the encouragement to do well at school and the push to do just that and the encouragement from their parents and family in general is the first thing that will make students want to learn and succeed at school.
Some succeed against all odds, like those three that the President mentioned in his speech and one can but hope that the students all over the country take that message that was contained in that speech to heart and act upon it.
© 2009
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