Honjii’s Harangues

I started writing this in response to a comment on my previous post, John McCain Leading Fight Against Obama.  I changed my mind and decided to write a post instead.

I’m baffled by the negativity toward and downright hatred of Obama coming from so many sources, some from people I never would have expected.  Slightly more than half of us were literally dancing in the streets when we elected Obama.  Some of our elation arose from the realization that we were finally free from the oppression and idiocy of the Bush regime, some stemmed from the knowledge that we were witnessing history being made, electing the first non-white President.  In addition, those of us that voted for him felt he was the best choice of the two remaining candidates to do the best for our country.

Obama inherited a huge mess, and while he is making mistakes and missteps, he has accomplished a lot in his short time in office.  But let’s get real, nobody is prepared for the job of Commander-in-Chief, unless they have been president of another country and that will never happen.  People are criticizing Obama because he’s not doing enough to fix our broken country.  They remind me of those obese folks, who having been living on fast food, Twinkies, and soda for the last ten years; decide it’s time to get in shape, buy a gym membership, hire a personal trainer and three weeks later complain they’re not movie star thin.  I’ve heard many a trainer explain to a client that it took years to get into their present condition, asking if they truly believed they could undo the damage, in a healthy way, in only a few weeks.  It took Bush eight years to screw things up, and you guys want Obama to wave a magic wand and fix it in eight days, eight weeks, eight months…what’s your acceptable timetable here?

I think a large part of the negativity against Obama has its roots in racism.  It reminds me of the attitudes people have about life in general.  I can: eat what I want, heart disease only happens to other people, smoking won’t make me sick, seat-belts, who needs ‘em?  But when they get heart disease, lung cancer, are paralyzed in a car accident they are in a state of shock, asking themselves, “How could this happen to ME?”  And now those that did not support Obama are experiencing that same shock.  They never believed it would happen to them, no way was America going to elect a black president; or those descriptions that make me cringe, calling him the N word or that colored boy.  But it happened and now they are all asking themselves how could this have happened to us, and how do we fix it?

How about you get behind him and rather than criticize every breath he takes and every move he makes, try to do your part to help dig us out of this huge hole before we find ourselves on the list of third-world nations where the best jobs we can get are online or telephone tech support for China’s huge corporate outsourcing programs.  It’s ironic, when I was a kid we used to dig holes in the ground and we thought if we dug deep enough we could dig all the way to China.  It seems we may have done just that.