Today

Posted on January 20, 2009
Filed Under Personal, Politics | 2 Comments

I am cautiously hopeful and optimistic about the Obama administration. It is a relief to have a thoughtful, curious, intelligent, well-spoken person at the head of the nation. And, like many, I am amazed that a country with our history of racism, has elected an African American president. That, alone, gives me considerable hope. From what I’ve been reading online, many people now have the sense that the government might again be relevant to their lives.  Eight years ago some people liked to talk about how George W. Bush was “the kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with.” I never saw it myself — the man has always struck me as a self-involved, spiteful, spoiled adolescent. Obama and his family, on the other hand, strike me as the sort of people I’d like to have in my neighborhood — ordinary folk with admirable character. And, today at least, the country has the feel of a neighborhood.

Comments

2 Responses to “Today”

  1. Peter on January 20th, 2009 11:44 am

    OBAMA VALENTINE

    And there’s Sidney Poitier on the bulldozer
    or carrying in a box of groceries or angry

    at a white woman ‘I’m through feeling small’
    ‘you get yourself another boy’

    in the sense that not to be someone’s ‘boy’
    is the true pivot of American sublimity

    exceptionalistically speaking
    so when I look at Obama (and who today

    isn’t?) I see Sidney’s traveling architect
    Homer Smith again in ancient 1963

    the modern fairy tale beginning wherein
    color is never referenced as a problem

    and that last shot of him
    driving away proud free and smiling.

  2. Edward Mycue on January 20th, 2009 6:34 pm

    juseph, i like your commentary on what you like in our president obama and his family. edward mycue