The American Legacy

Now that the campaigning has moved away from Texas and the next "big state to win" is on the East Coast, I feel left out of what's been going on. I get updates through e-mail, of course, and if I weren't so busy, I could go to all the websites myself and read everything that's going on every day. Who has time for that? I'm not one of those that can sit in front of my computer for hours every day; I have to work, I have to exercise, I have to do the shopping, I have to see that baseball game, I have to finish reading my book, writing my own, or just sit down with no electronics on and just breathe. So what I do see of the campaigning is what happens to be the most inflammatory thing of the moment on a news clip.

It seems some black preacher voiced his opinion on how white people and white politics has treated black people in general over the centuries that this country has been in existence. This preacher happens to be Barack Obama's preacher.

Some people are sitting around wondering what this guy could possibly be so angry about; some people thinks this guy, along with so many others, should just get over it and move on; some people are getting all red-faced and choking on their indignation while sputtering racial discrimination and how dare he say such horrible things about us!

Others, such as myself, wonder why people can't look back on American History and see that things sometimes were done wrong and why can't we just admit that? We joke about a president that can't admit that something he did may not have been the best way to do things, but try to glance over the mistakes that were made along the way by everyone. We make mistakes. That's what makes us human. Like Barack says in his speech, "We are the sum of all our parts".

Now, what gets me about black anger is that they were not the only ones that were treated unjustly during the span of American history. Native Americans could certainly argue that point. While we were building this country from one coast to the other, Chinese and Irish immigrants were treated horribly--we couldn't call them slaves, though, because they received what could loosely be termed as "wages". And the Irish were white! Somehow just being Irish made them sub-human. Poor people of all ethnicities were--and still are--viewed as the scum of the earth who dirty the landscape with their pallid existence. Throughout the history of the world, there have always been a people that thought they were better than others--how they always seem to be the ones in all the power positions is beyond me. Why do we get stuck in the same place century after century? You'd think we would have all learned something by now.

The sum of all my parts, looking back on my ancestry, goes something like this: English, Scottish, Irish, German, Prussian, Swiss, Native American, French, Spanish and Italian. I am descended from serfs and nobility, merchants and farmers, drunks and explorers, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. We're all made up of history. I look back proudly on the ancestors who crossed the ocean on a boat that got lost at sea and survived the starvation that took 2/3 of the passengers on that vessel. One of those even dared to get back on a boat to go back and get the woman who was to be his wife and her family to bring them over to the dream that was America. I have a many times great grandmother and grandfather that were tried and convicted at the Salem Witch Trials, but got out of it alive. Only about 150 years separates me from the grandfather whom, as a boy, rode the countryside with his uncles passing out vigilante justice to farmers that treated their own families and neighbors ill by being drunkards or gamblers; unfortunately, if there were no drunks or gamblers to teach a lesson to, they were known also to drag Catholics out of their homes in the middle of the night to pass the time. Not too long ago, I found out that my great-great grandfather was a Grand Wizard in the KKK. That really turned my stomach; how could I have descended from that? And isn't he spinning in his grave right now knowing his descendant is supporting a black candidate for President of the United States?

The thing is, we could all be--should be--the best part of our history. Accept what's been done, and do better.