When you’re Black, the question is never “what can you do?” but always “what else can you do?”
I say this because it hasn’t even been a full seven days since President Obama put the boogeyman to bed and already Sarah Palin is accusing him of “pussy-footing” because he won’t release Osama bin Laden’s death photos and posters on several websites I’ve surfed are suggesting that former president George W. Bush somehow “laid the groundwork” for what Mr. Obama has accomplished.
Yes. That’s right. The same George W. Bush that attacked Iraq and Afghanistan as a response to 9/11, which should seem really odd to people now since it turns out that bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan.
America is the home of the obituary culture. We’re a nation that drives with our eyes in the rearview. Stealing a concept from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, if Jesus were to come back today and in the flesh, certain members of the clergy would likely have him killed because he’d be more valuable to them as a symbol than as a man.
Similarly, in the American psyche, all the good things have happened already. All the great men are either dead or gone.
We’re suspicious of the successful and active—especially if they’re Black—and we’re afraid that a compliment might go to their heads and make them mistake-prone so we avoid them like the teammates of a pitcher in the midst of a no-hitter.
Contrarily, putzes, boneheads and losers gain our sympathy—especially if they’re white—and we convince ourselves that these men aren’t really bad, they just haven’t had enough time to show their inner greatness.
Of course, we could give putzes, boneheads and losers chances until the cows come home (from wherever the cows have gone) and all we’d see is more stupidity, more inanity and more loss.
After Bush started two bad wars, we gave him four more years just to watch him tank both the housing and the stock markets.
With only two major gaffes to Barack’s detriment (that Libyan fiasco and his inability to lower the unemployment numbers), don’t be surprised to see your boy lose to whoever the Republicans can mount in 2012.
Ending the war in Iraq, passing his healthcare bill, facilitating a stock market rise and killing bin Laden is way more than most people thought President Obama would do in his first term, and the possibility that he might yet do even more in his next term is probably way more than some people can take.
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