For well over two centuries, the United States has been vastly more diverse than its ruling families. Now the Obama family has flipped that around, with a Technicolor cast that looks almost nothing like their overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Protestant predecessors in the role. The family that produced Barack and Michelle Obama is black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. They speak English; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew; African languages including Swahili, Luo and Igbo; and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Very few are wealthy, and some — like Sarah Obama, the stepgrandmother who only recently got electricity and running water in her metal-roofed shack — are quite poor.
The inauguration of Barack Obama yesterday represents change in so many dimensions that I think it'll take quite a while for us to become aware of them all.
I am so moved.
In Gassho,
RevWik
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1 comment:
Just keep in kind that representing something and actually doing that or those things represented are regrettably all too often two rather different things. . .
Hopefully President Barack Obama will do much better at walking his talk than a lot of the U*Unitarians I know.
The word verification code for this comment is turiali which *I* will interpret as hinting at too real*ly
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