Columnist - John Sammon
I was thinking a lot today about why I’m going to vote for Barack Obama on Tuesday. Partly, it’s a chance to undo the past, that of my own, and my country’s.

Only part of the past. Not the good parts.

I was raised in a typical white racist middle class household of the 1950s. I inherited some prejudices that negated my own humanity, and threatened to trap me in a prison of my own making. It took awhile to understand that.

Obama carries the promise that America, an imperfect experiment that has always fallen short of its original promise, can finally show the world; we are capable of going beyond the narrow confines of belligerence, and tribalism, of them against us. Of a mentality that says, never openly, that only a part of us matter.

In the end, this is not a case of competing philosophies. One of the candidates has shown he is a rationalist, a person who tries to think, rather than just react. Obama is a populist who views the country in more of an all-inclusive way, rather than as disparate groups of worthies, and those who aren’t.

The Civil War was fought to see if America could survive its own burgeoning immorality, and it barely did, though the job was left unfinished. Now, it’s time to see if we the people, all of us, can climb upwards to the next rung of the ladder, to become a country in which all creeds, if not embraced, can at least be tolerated, and have their rightful place in the sun.

Lincoln once called it, “the better angels of our nature.”

For America to live up to its true promise, it has to include the contributions of all its people, not just a few chosen by the imagined destiny of their coloring and background.

But all people. I call it the value of a single human being.

I’m not voting for Obama because he is black. I’m voting for him because I respect what I perceive as his openness, and integrity. But the fact that he is black is a plus. There has never been a black president before.

Up until now, I never thought there would be.

Obama won’t end anger, or racism, or partisan attacks, or arrogance, or wrong thinking.

He will demonstrate, however, that a person of his color can sit in the White House and not only more than hold his own with those who have gone before, but achieve his own positive marks on history, knowing as we know that with any human activity, it will be human, and thus fallible.

The big difference is in attitude.

Obama’s biggest attraction perhaps is that he seems more open to new possibilities, and for that reason, appears to embrace the future, rather than be threatened by it.

I consider myself not just an American, but also a citizen of the world. Obama more clearly demonstrates this concept.

The very fact he is running at all is something of a miracle, and gives me great pride as an American. It generates the possibility that this country can finally come closer to what its Founding Fathers said it should be. It establishes hope.

First of all, there’s hope for me if I can feel this way. Perhaps I can soar beyond the narrow shackles of what I had been taught. Maybe I can become the kind of person I think I can be, kinder, braver, more giving. Perhaps I can learn something, despite my age.

If Obama can run, maybe I can do these things.

Only children are totally open-minded, probably the reason for Obama’s popularity among the young.

I’m voting for Obama not based on ideology or statistical claims and counter-claims or the usual election-day rhetoric, exaggerations or grandstanding, but because he represents a cleaner break with the past, and its confining, hide-bound limitations. The future should be welcomed, not feared.

I think that by confronting these past divisions head-on, which an Obama electoral victory would surely bring, will allow the country to rise a little farther away from pettiness, and into the light of potential.

That’s what hope is all about.

Copyright 2008 Sammonsays.

Popularity: 4% [?]

The GOP (Grand Old Propaganda) is working to keep eligible African-Americans from voting in several states. To get an idea of how many African-Americans nationwide lack driver’s licenses, recall Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when thousands were stranded without transportation. “Crawford Republicans” could make the old “Jim Crow Democrats” look like pikers when it comes to voter suppression.

Writes: Jonathan Alter

It was a mainstay of Jim Crow segregation: for 100 years after the Civil War, Southern white Democrats kept eligible blacks from voting with poll taxes, literacy tests and property requirements. Starting in the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court declared these assaults on the heart of American democracy unconstitutional.

Now, with the help of a 2008 Supreme Court decision, Crawford vs. Marion County (Indiana) Election Board, white Republicans in some areas will keep eligible blacks from voting by requiring driver’s licenses. Not only is this new-fangled discrimination constitutional, it’s spreading.

GOP proponents of the move say they are merely trying to reduce voter fraud. But while occasional efforts to stuff ballot boxes through phony absentee voting still surface, the incidence of individual vote fraud—voting when you aren’t eligible—is virtually non-existent, as “The Truth About Vote Fraud,” a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, clearly shows. In other words, the problem Republicans claim they want to combat with increased ID requirements doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, those ID hurdles facing individuals do nothing to stop the organized insiders who still try to game the system…..[ more ]

‘Jim Crow’ America

More Pics | The African Holocaust Album

References:

1. Jim Crow Laws
2. Ohio Republicans Use Lawsuit — To Fight for State’s Crucial Votes

Popularity: 10% [?]