Thursday, April 28, 2011

April Storms

Carnival barkers, blatant racists, strange strange women, uber wealthy conservatives, and the storms.

I couldn't articulate my anger, disgust, disappointment, and just plain rage at the events of yesterday and even leading up to yesterday.  It would be that April was the month of crazy and almost too much going on like being on a roller coaster all month, all of it because some white men can not stand the fact that a black man is the President and are trying to undermine him and destroy the nation.

In April, we had the budget proposal that wanted to give more tax breaks to the wealth with the promise that they would produce jobs (it has been a year since the mid-term election and still, no jobs, unless you count McDonald's 50,000 hiring spree or the new Chik-fil-A that opened up in Des Peres).  They want to pay for this on the back of seniors.  They lie, lie, and lie so much that the media follow them around like lap dogs, scraping up every piece of file spew that comes from their mouths, like Donald Trump.

I have never been a Donald Trump fan, I thought he was a bully and loud mouth, but being the dutiful MBA candidate that I was over a decade ago, I looked at his franchise called The Apprentice for how they engaged, it was, after all, all about business.  As the years have gone on and the country has lost their sense of creativity and the only thing on TV is reality shows more ridiculous than the next, he has stooped to the level of Celebrity Apprentice with characters like Joan Rivers, LaToya Jackson, and Gary Busey making fools of themselves for an extended fifteen minutes of fame, and all the while, there is Donald, sitting on his throne, thinking he is the greatest thing since sliced bread, without releasing his tax return.

So this loud mouth proclaims that he has experts examining the birth certificate, not, but hey, it made for good media right?  The President called him on it with a news conference yesterday and produced the birth certificate that hardly any states give out anymore (I do not have the long form for any of my four Missouri-born children).  This didn't shut up that pompous rich man who only gained his riches from his father, he proceeded to take credit for it and still wouldn't look at it, caught in his national lie and exposure of his racism at its ugliest point.

Baratunde Thurston summed up my feelings precisely with his youtube video.

It reeked of centuries old questioning of the validity, manhood, and intelligence of every black man in the country, the reason why they have destroyed the economy, the reason they have destroyed middle class jobs, the reason why they have attacked the teachers unions, the reasons why they are trying to destroy this President is simply because they have always feared the heights that black men would reach if they were just given the same level playing field and opportunity as the rich white boys, make this truly a meritocracy and they will find that black men will rise to even this, the highest office in the land.

This has been a spring full of storms both man-made and those that come from God who, as many of us believe, has been trying to get our attention through all the clutter and noise.  And no, I'm not talking about the right-wing, mean-spirited, evil-at-all-points god served by those religious right who want to attack women, let the poor go hungry, and care nothing about children, no I'm talking about Jesus, his God, whose resurrection we just celebrated, who walked about the poor, who fed the hungry, who forgave the sinners, who threw over the money changers in the temple, the one who said to render to Cesar (taxes) was he is due because he knew there was a collective responsibility in society, I'm talking about that God, who has been trying to get us to see the inhumanity of everything of the past few years.

My friends, my white friends, my black friends, I hope you are as disturbed by this as the MSNBC commentator was yesterday when he tried to get that crazy (not-born-in-this-country, deep-accented) white woman to apologize to The President of the United State!  No, instead, she tried to show "proof" that now the President is committing Social Security Fraud and actually called him a liar.  What is it with white people that think they are the moral authority for everyone.  Never, ever, did anyone ever disrespect the office of the President of the United States when we endured eight years of President Bush, the same one who took us to two wars with a sovereign nation, who took away our civil liberties to the point of being almost strip searched at the airport, no one every stood up in a State of the Union to call him a liar, challenge his birth, or even his intelligence (even though Bush was a barely C student, drunken frat boy who somehow found religion before the election).

I will not watch NBC as long as they have that clown on the network continuing to spew his http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/28/bob-schieffer-trump-racism_n_854817.html, just like advertisers finally pulled away from Glenn Beck, forcing Fox to cancel his show, just like some of them tried to say it was a non-issue, I'm hoping that the real conservatives will rise up and put this fringe element to rest, it is making us look bad.

April has been a month of tornadoes, storms, and devastation, I hope May will bring some sunshine and common sense and real discussions of real issues.