Trying To Understand

Forgive me for this, but I was cleaning off my desktop--you know, when I say that I still think of a damp cloth and maybe some lemon pledge--but I digress. I was trashing little files cluttering up my desktop, when I came across this list. I don't even remember where I got it or who wrote it but I kept it because I thought it was fun. Yes, its over, the whole bloody mess, and today Obama even invited McCain to sit down and imagine how he can be useful in his golden years, so touching. But I can't help reproducing this list for you, just to rehash the good ole' days of incredulous befuddlement as we held head in hands trying to understand how any voter with an IQ two points higher than a fence post could be undecided.

So I give you, "Trying to understand"


* If you grow up in Hawaii and were raised by a single Mom and your grandparents, you're "exotic”, “different" and not a real American.

* If you grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers you're a quintessential American.

* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

* If you name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

* If you graduate near the top of you class from Harvard Law School, you are an elitist who's not a real American and certainly not qualified to be President of the U.S.

* If you attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, OR finish close to last in your class at the Naval Academy, you're well grounded and the most qualified to hold the two highest offices in the U.S.

* If you spend 3 years as a community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.

* If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.

* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife to marry the heiress the next month, you're a maverick and someone to be looked up too as promoting Christian values.

* If you teach children about sexual predators, you are irresponsible and eroding the fiber of society but if while Mayor of your small town, you charge rape victims a fee for rape kits you are to be applauded for your leadership.

* If, while Governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only programs, providing no other sex education option in your State's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

* If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's ; however if you can't remember how many houses you own, your wife is one of the richest people in America who inherited her money and wears dresses every day that cost several thousand dollars, the two of you have more in common with and can relate better to "real" Americans than the snooty Harvard Law graduates who paid their own way through college and law school.

* If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that hates America and advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.


Oh, I get it.

Dear Mr. President Elect

I wrote this a few days before the election and almost choked on an ice cube when, in his Grant Park speech he started to talk about a grandmother. But, alas, it was someone else. This is what I wrote.


Please forward this message if at all possible.

Mr. Obama,

I am of your age. My grandmother lived the bulk of her life in the Oakland, California area and watched as her modest neighborhood of single-family homes slowly transformed into an inner city ghetto during the 1960’s and 1970’s. She mistakenly blamed the color of the new residents skin rather than the poverty and socio-economic inequality that they suffered under for the decline of her neighborhood. I had long ago resigned myself to the fact that, because of that experience, my grandmother was—there are no polite words—a racist.
My grandmother celebrated her 103 birthday last April and, in recent weeks has been fighting declining health, but has been determined to stay with us because she wanted to vote. And vote she did, with an early ballot in the state of Nevada, for you Mr. Obama.
When my grandmother passes I will be saying goodbye to someone who defeated a racist past rather than to someone who took that contagion to the grave. Thank you.

Dennis Fox

Ps. My sincere condolences on the passing of your grandmother this day.


When I was three I have a memory, possibly one of my first, of my mother crying while watching a funeral on the television. It was 1963 and the nation was mourning JFK. Several days ago I was sent into an emotional state resembling that early memory, only now I was shedding tears of optimism rather than tears of hope snuffed out. I am middle aged, but all my life America has been inexorably moving toward a conservative notion of the meaning of things. That shift has done us so much harm, but we may now begin, if all cooperate, a long slow slog toward the light.