"Can't We All Just Get Along"

This was Rodney King a few decades back. It didn't work then and it ain't working now. It could be Obama’s problem. I have tried real hard to understand him. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it’s my desire to see the first Black President succeed. I have been fighting back a conclusion that he simply doesn’t have any real fight in him. This has lead me to think about how do we learn how to put up a fight for what we believe in?

Drawing on my own experience. Could it be something that needs to be learned early in life. Maybe even in childhood? In the radical world where I spent my growing up years fighting for what you believed in was not just taught but you learned how to practice it. Questioning authority was the mantra of that world. Hence in Public School I neither stood for the Pledge Allegiance or sang the Star Spangled Banner. Yes it was tough the first few times but little by little you became proud of what you were doing. Learning to say, like the little girl, “But The Emperor Has No Clothes.” In the home I grew up in she was the hero numero uno.

Okay, now go over to the world Obama grew up in. His white mother taught him how to “Get Along” in the world of the white men. Obama talked a lot about “change.” Yet he was not a participant in any movement that dealt with any meaningful change like the Civil Rights efforts. So all through his first two years as President he spent an inordinate amount of time and political capital reaching across the isle to find, NOBODY THERE!

We hoped, well maybe he’ll get it now? They really don’t want anything to do with you. They just want “There Country Back.” Translation of that “underneath feeling” We just want that Black man out of the White House. He can not accept that. For Obama it means they are rejecting me so I must not be making myself clear. “I’ll just keep trying.” That’s where we are now. He just keeps rolling that same stone up the, “we can all get along hill.” You know where that got Sisyphus?

With all the rejections he finally has to find a way to prove that “we can all get along.” Down that road he ends up making compromises that just gives the store away to his opposition. His base goes berserk watching him say okay let the Bush tax cuts for the rich just stay a little longer and then maybe just maybe we can do something about it. It is sad that the first Black President in our history is not measuring up to a fight with the very people who simply want to see him in the trash bin of history. “Can’t we all just get along and be friends” a much desired wish and never achieved. To bad.