It's been a while since I've written anything on here, but after seeing a couple Obama speeches on CNN today while caulking in hotel rooms (my preferred way to describe my current job, since pronounced out loud it might lead you to believe I were a gigolo) I've gotten more and more excited about our next president. (Jeb's not counting the votes this time, right?) My feelings have come in waves: believing in the possibility of true change, then thinking Obama will be just another centrist Democrat, then back to hope, where I stand now. Hearing him affirm that every young person should be able to afford college, that health care should not be denied for the seriously ill, sent goosebumps down my back. These rights should really go without saying, and the fact that believing in them gets you called a radical in this country is disgusting, but if a majority of the American voters feel agree with Obama's platform enough to cast their ballots for him, maybe I'm not so radical after all.
The New Yorker recently featured a clever piece by Hendrik Hertzberg highlighting the absurdity of the Republicans' calling out of Obama as a socialist. Also on that magazine's website, George Packer quotes Obama's book "The Audacity of Hope" which in turn quotes economist Warren Buffet, which I will in turn quote here in its entirety:
They have this idea that it’s “their money” and they deserve to keep every penny of it. What they don’t factor in is all the public investment that lets us live the way we do. Take me as an example. I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can’t run very fast. I’m not particularly strong. I’d probably end up as some wild animal’s dinner. But I was lucky enough to be born into a time and place where society values my talent, and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the laws and the financial system to let me do what I love doing—and make a lot of money doing it. The least I can do is help pay for all that.
Packer closes with, "What this suggests isn’t socialism, but wisdom."
Ironically enough, that "hope" image I used up there came (via a Google image search) from a horrendously designed, poorly punctuated site which paints He With the Evil Middle Name of Hussain as a socialist, pointing to the revolutionary imagery as proof. Check it out for a laff.
I leave you with a video of Lil' Wayne and Juelz Santana's version of Nas and Jay-Z's "Black Republican," theoretically because it contains the line I named this entry for, but mostly because it's a hella tight song.
Now GO VOTE!!!! Yes on 1A, 2 and 5! No on 4, 6, and 8!
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