One good thing
I’m not happy about the election results in policy terms, but there’s a societal benefit here, and the person who put it best might just have been Chris Rock. At his show in Richmond this spring (and probably plenty of others too), the thing he said he most looked forward to from this election was that a generation of kids, including his own, would grow up with Barack Obama — a black man — as their childhood image of “what a president looks like.”
Well, he’s got his wish. And now, nobody can tell a black kid that he or she can’t be president, or anything else that kid wants to be, or that America is so intractably racist that success is impossible for them. The celebration in Chicago puts the lie to all that. Congratulations, President-elect Obama; what President Bush called the soft bigotry of low expectations is one societal pathology that we can damn well put to bed tonight, and that’s good for all of us.
4 November 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: politics