President Obama Must "Press Toward The Mark of His High Calling."

1.20.10) President Obama Must “Press Toward The Mark of His High Calling.”

As we mark the first anniversary of the inauguration of the nation’s first African American president, we find ourselves also casting our attention toward the just-completed senate race in Massachusetts which witnessed a Republican, Scott Brown, snatching away from Democrat challenger Martha Coakley the seat which had been held for 46 years by the late Edward M. Kennedy. With this improbable victory also comes the reality that the Democrats no longer have their 60 seat filibuster-proof super majority, a luxury which almost assured passage of President Obama’s ambitious domestic agenda. Included in this domestic agenda is the president’s health care plan, which both houses of Congress were poised to vote on once the details of the House and Senate versions were ironed out.

Now with Scott Brown’s election victory, a 41st Republican has been added to the world’s most exclusive club and he has already promised to vote against the president’s health care plan. Not only has Senator-elect Brown promised to vote against the White House sponsored health care bill, but he has also promised to veto cap and trade, immigration reform, and other Democrat-sponsored legislative goals.

In the light of this, we here at shermancrockett.com are urging President Obama to “forget those things that are behind, and to press toward the mark of the prize of the high calling,” a phrase taken from the apostle Paul’s epistle to the Philippian Christians (3.13-14). In particular we urge the president to stop making references to the failed policies of the eight years of the George W. Bush administration. We say this because in doing this the president comes across as petty, vindictive, and non-visionary. He is too smart and gifted to continue to play the broken political record that we’ve been listening to for over a year, if you include the time before his historic inauguration.

When Barack Obama was first elected to the presidency the freshness of his historic electoral victory resonated in all of us who supported him, no matter what our ethnic origin. But now that the initial euphoria of his ascendancy to the White House has faded, our hope is that President Obama will use both the accomplishments and failures of his nascent presidency as a springboard to both political and personal greatness.

He can certainly accomplish this by pressing forward and forgetting about what George W. Bush, our 43rd president, did or, in the opinion of many, failed to do. As the present occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Mr. Obama now owns every issue which affects this nation, both domestic and foreign. Iraq is his war now, just as is Afghanistan and all other elements of the war on terror, which, by the way, needs to be called just that; a war against terror. To call it anything other than what it is is, in our opinion, a colossal mistake.

The economy is his, no matter what policies from previous administrations may have contributed to our present fiscal circumstances. Mr. Obama, we here at shermancrockett.com strongly encourage you to press toward the future without dwelling on the past. In doing so you will be much better focused on what this great nation needs most; a focused, visionary leader who will lead us out of the political/social darkness and into the marvelous light of national greatness.

President Code-Switcher

President Code-Switcher

I can distinctly remember many events from my childhood. One type of event that will be forever seared in my consciousness is hearing my mother talk to white people, especially bill collectors, on the phone. My two sisters and I always knew when mom was talking to white people because her dialect would become very distinct (even though we're from upstate New York and already have a rather nasal dialect) and very different from the speech that she would use around her children, other relatives, and her contemporaries.

This is why the recent dust-up over recent remarks by Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) about the distinct possibility of then-Senator Barack Obama becoming President of the United States because he is a “light-skinned Black who speaks without a Negro dialect, unless he chooses to,” doesn’t surprise most African Americans at all.

Blacks and other oppressed minorities have for hundreds if not thousands of years used certain linguistic and other devices as survival tools. In the case of African Americans, switching from “hood” dialect to a more distinctive, “white” sounding dialect has a very long history. In my mother’s case, she would code-switch as a means of either consciously or subconsciously surviving both linguistically and culturally when having to conduct business with whites. And it should not surprise us that then-candidate Barack Hussein Obama would also code-switch when speaking to predominantly African American audiences.

As an aspiring campaigner, then-Senator Obama had already heard that the rumor was in some circles that he wasn’t “black enough.” This charge had its origin in the facts that he didn’t grow up in the urban enclaves of America, and that his mother was a rather eccentric white woman who had married both an African (Obama's father) and an Indonesian. While most African Americans grew up in such urban “jungles” as Cleveland, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Miami, Barack Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, not exactly prime breeding grounds for tough-talking gangster rappers. Knowing this, in order to galvanize African American support, candidate Obama knew that he would have to somehow earn his cultural bonafides. Thus he became a community organizer in Chicago and eventually joined a church with a strong Afro-centric worship style. He may have even subconsciously chosen to marry the very dark and lovely Michelle Robinson as a validating stamp of approval for the black identification that he so longingly sought.

As it concerns Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the lightning rod of the controversy, If we think about it carefully, Senator Reid comes from a generation which referred to African Americans as “colored,” “negro,” or, the more perjorative, so-called “n” word. For us to expect him to all of a sudden abandon the vocabulary that he has used all of his life is unreasonable, as it is also very unreasonable to compare him to former Mississippi Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Senator Reid never proclaimed that voting for a hypocritical segregationist (Strom Thurmond) would have “saved the nation from all of our troubles,” as Trent Lott of Mississippi .

There is another distinct difference between Senator Reid and Senator Lott of Mississippi: I just mentioned the main difference; Lott is from Mississippi, a state, to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "sweltering with the heat of racial injustice . . . " when we think of murdered civil rights workers and lynchings we don't think of Nevada . . . we think of Mississippi.there is no movie called "Nevada Burning," but there is one called "Mississippi Burning."

So unfortunately Senator Lott carried a burden that Senator Reid didn't; the burden of a long history of racial terrorism . . . while racism is a nationwide problem, it used to be epidemic in Mississippi . . . and for Senator Lott to extol the virtues of Senator Strom Thurmond, a man who preached segregation now and forever, yet had a love child by a black servant, is the height of hypocrisy. Exactly what did the good senator from MIssissippi mean when he said that " if Strom Thurmond had been elected (on the Dixiecrat ticket) as president, this nation wouldn't have had the problems that it has had . . ." Did he mean that there wouldn't have been a civil rights movement??? Did he mean that blacks, Latinos and others would have been kept in their "place?" What did he mean???

U.S. Should Invite Haiti to Become 51st State

Haiti Needs a Marshall Plan And to Be Invited to Become a Part of The United States

If the United States of America, one of if not the most generous nations in the world, really wants to help the unspeakable suffering of the Haitian people, she should implement a modern day Marshall Plan, after the Herculean effort implemented to rebuild Europe from its World War II devastation.

To merely pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a nation without ensuring that it won’t sink back into abject poverty is, in my opinion, both a waste of valuable resources and a lack of good financial stewardship. Surely we have tired of continually hearing about the fact that Haiti is “the poorest nation in the western hemisphere.” We will continue to lament the tune of that broken record unless someone takes the initiative to do something which will have long-lasting effects.

I suggest (drum roll here) that Haiti become part of the United States, either as a territory, as is Puerto Rico, or better yet, as our 51st state. A nation that is approximately the size of Maryland with a population of about 10,000,000 people, it has about the same population of Michigan (2006 estimate). And rest assured that if you took a political x-ray of me you wouldn’t find one imperialistic or colonialistic bone in my 52 year old body.

The reality is that nations such as Haiti haven’t done much if anything to prove that they can survive as sovereign nations. With the world’s economies in a constant state of flux, helping nations like Haiti is becoming more and more troublesome. Here we have the United States, with an unemployment rate over 10%, about to send about $100,000,000 of aid to an impoverished nation which will continue to be impoverished once the cameras have left. Why not politely petition the Haitian people and in a politically correct manner ask them if they would like to become a member of the most powerful nation on earth. This way they would be assured of having unending resources because they would then have congressional representation, ie, two U.S. senators, and about the same amount of members in the House of Representatives as Michigan.

Now of course the question has to be answered as to what would become of Haiti’s current leaders, a question which has no easy answer. But in all fairness, at the very least Haiti’s president, Rene Preval, could be the first governor of the sovereign state of Haiti, and the other government leaders could be its first members of Congress, with the top two leaders under the current president as its two senators. This political arrangement would then suffice until general elections could be held.

Now I know that many Americans (especially on the political left), Haitians, and foreigners such as Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and others, would decry this as another example of U.S. imperialism/colonialism. But who has a better solution? Once the dead and injured are removed from the millions of tons of rubble and buried (many ingloriously and in gruesome and ghastly manners, such as the opening and dumping of corpes into decades-old crypts), and some semblance of order is restored to the island, what will become of it? I say rebuild the nation which was founded by a slave revolt in 1804 and then offer them as much red, white, and blue, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.