explaining america

i'm playing catch up. i realized i hadn't posted about the merryman  family election experience quite yet and that made me sad, because it really did impact us...

it's no secret which way the merrymans roll. we were early adopters of the huck for president campaign. in fact, the first money i ever gave to a campaign was during this election for huck. i still wear my t-shirt to target and i faithfully drink my saturday joe from his mug. that's joe - coffee not joe - plumber. anyway...

dennis goes to a pretty progressive school - it's an art school, and encourages free thinking - sort of. he came home nightly with reports of intellectual throw-downs, where kids would call each other to the carpet about to whom they would cast their vote. only if you said mccain, like dennis did, you were ridiculed. denounced for being racist and said to be a lemming. when dennis asked what the hubbub was about, why no one voted for mccain, his classmates said, 'we're voting for obama because he's black. unless you hate blacks, you'll vote for him, too." 

we had many conversations over pasta about this phenomenon. that we vote for conservative candidates because of how they spend our money and because of their belief that babies have a right to live. we don't vote for people based on the color of their skin. he was torn up about why the students at his school didn't think for themselves. he wanted to know if they knew what obama stood for and why they couldn't talk about that instead of the color of his skin.

so the election happened. and...i'm not a sore loser. i firmly believe that you don't get to be a candidate for president without at least a small inkling of how to run a country (although i'd love to have been a fly on the wall when he went to his first national security briefing). 

but the morning after - as i was hoping for a repeat of 2004 when we went to bed with one guy as president and woke up with another - the saddest thing happened. the channel 4 news interviewed a student that goes to d's school at the bus stop downtown. and she said, "i voted for obama. i didn't care if he was democrat or republican...i voted for him because he was black."

and this proves to me that racism is alive and well. we vote for someone because he looks cool...he probably has an ipod and talks a little like we do. we vote for someone because we want to be cool..."i voted for the first black president." we vote for someone for all the wrong reasons. and there's a country that will live or die based on the choices this man makes. and i know this is not the majority, but just to know that the thought process exists makes me very, very angry.

the day after the election, i was driving home and listening to npr. bill moyers was interviewed and basically said that if you wanted to see if racism was alive, you need only look at the electoral map. he said that people in the south clearly voted only for white men, and that republicans were so out of touch because they continue to campaign based on "values." i got so angry i ran home and commented on npr.org. 

i voted for mccain because i believe what he believes. i voted for him because he stands for what i stand for. i voted for him because he's got some years under his belt and has done more than visit our enemies on a press trip.  i did not vote for him because he looks like me.

it makes me happy that history has been made and my son was alive and in america when it happened. i just wish our dirty secrets weren't exposed on such a public stage.