He wants to mediate, not lead. He doesn’t seem to have any real goals.

Oh, yeah, I remember student teaching in college. They gave me about 30 seconds before the first attacks started, and it was a small town school in rural New York. You either set the tone immediately or your life becomes a living hell.

The only people Obama feels comfortable criticizing are liberals. He can’t bring himself to deal with the opposition. It won’t be much longer until all he has is opposition.

You can’t just waffle around about how well, little Johnny is a good kid who’s just misbehaving. You have to come down like the hand of God and leave him shaking and wondering what exactly just happened to him. LBJ knew how to do this. Obama, on the other hand… you put Obama into a middle-school classroom, and they’d have him resigning his teaching job in tears by the end of the first week.

If you read the local letters to the editor you get flashbacks from those days. The phrasing is identical. People have this weird concept that in the old days you could spot the haters because they used “the N-word”. They don’t understand that “Colored” was the socially acceptable term. The N-word would get you a smack if you were a child as only “trash” used it.

The results were blatant, but the language was anything but. You had better have learned what was really being said or you could find a burning cross on your front yard, or, even your living room.

The Obama campaign played the race card during the primary, and I called them on it when I so sites going along with their stupidity. Attacking people like Harold Ickes was just ignorant. Their problem is that they called wolf too often, and now are afraid to deal with the real “wolf” when it appeared in DC.

I was perhaps seven, with my mother in a grocery store on the boundary of white and black neighborhoods, when I grew thirsty. Mom lifted me up to the nearest water fountain, which happened to be labeled “Colored.” A store manager spotted us and rushed over in a veritable panic, pointing frantically to the sign and speaking with great concern to my mother. Mom, bless her, said to him, “It’s the same water,” and let me continue drinking. Then again, my family was atypical.

The whole business of racism in America, contrary to my fondest hopes in the mid-Sixties, is not over, and it’s not over because of people like Wilson and Beck and the whole nasty crew on the other side of the aisle, who are busy resurrecting the worst racial fears of the less socially aware among us. It’s not even clear to me yet whether having a Black president will actually improve the situation or make the GOPers redouble their efforts to plant the worst motivations in people’s brains.

Recently, Spencer Ackerman (I think) remarked on the treatment of Obama as “three-fifths of a president,” and it occurred to me to wonder if anyone in the GOP base even caught the reference. Either way, the phrase sticks in my mind. To my chagrin, this is not over yet.

The real problem is that here there is a history of violence to go along with the racism. It’s one thing when the racism results in bar fights between guys who families came from Italy and those who came from Spain over who gets to claim Columbus, or other such silliness, and the murders and bombings over desegregation.

We have vigilantes wandering around near the US-Mexican border, and when you throw in the drug gangs and law enforcement you have a recipe for a lot of dead people, many of them innocent bystanders going about their business.

Of course, the Indians can understand that kind of problem, because there are ethnic killings all the time in India.

Until we deal honestly with the problem and the haters that keep it going, it’s another roadblock to the process of recovery.

There are real, substantial problems, as far as I’m concerned, with what Obama and Congress seem to be headed for in health care reform, but who wants to get involved and risk looking like you are offering aid and comfort to the crazies?

Have to agree with Comrade Kevin.

Oh well… back to work. 🙂

It still goes on in some places, Jill, although the claim is that students are doing it voluntarily, and it isn’t school policy. The same thing happens in the cafeterias.

Things are a lot better because it isn’t promoted by the powers that be, CK, and it isn’t socially acceptable anymore, but the stupid will always be with us. The worrying thing is that some many are coming out into the open with their hatred, and even carrying signs like the early days of desegregation. I remember the marches and murders as news, CK, not history. It was a very dangerous and nasty time. Understanding the “dog whistles” was a survival skill, not an academic subject.