Last night I had decided I was boycotting the State of the Union address by President Obama. I just wasn’t in the mood for being inspired. Earlier during the day I had been really upset about the case of Kelley Williams-Bolar who was sentenced to ten days of jail for fraud after she used a family member’s address to send her kids to a better school outside of her neighborhood in Akron Ohio. I didn’t think that story would piss me off as much as it did. I must be hanging around kids too much these days. I don’t condone her breaking any laws. I was just heartbroken that she had to put her freedom on the line just to try and save her kids from a substandard education. The judge laid down the law like she went on a crime spree when she was just trying to be a good parent. Make her pay the tuition she should have, fine her or expel the kids from the school and send them back to the hood if you feel the need to but don’t send the lady to jail and try to kill her future career. After reading about that all day I was in no mood to hear the president’s inspirational words that don’t seem to be making it down to real America.
There’s a strange bi-product going on around the country since President Obama was elected. Most black people tell themselves that they don’t expect him to be just our president and that’s true. He’s the president of the country for everyone. At the same time there have been these local stories here and there that seem to be racially motivated but none of the so call leaders we have seem to be saying anything because they are trying not to hurt the president. A school system in North Carolina reversed the desegregation of their schools and there’s been hardly anything said about it. If the sheriff in Jena Louisiana would have locked up the Jena Six in 2009 or 2010 they would have probably still been in there because no one would have went down there to rally.
While I didn’t watch the speech live I did read up on it later and I noticed a lot of people in Louisiana were upset that the president didn’t mention the oil spill or offshore drilling. When will people understand that modern politics is all about independent voters and swing states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania? The president knows that even if he came down here and handed out the offshore drilling licenses himself the people in this state still won’t vote for him. There was no need to mention us in his speech. Our electoral votes have already been counted for his unnamed opponent two years from now.
One thing America could improve in is trying to understand what a person does or says based on their perspective. When George W. Bush was president I knew his dad had been president and that he made money working in the oil industry. He could have done the first 30 minutes of his state of the union address on the benefits of oil and offshore drilling and I wouldn’t have been the least bit shocked. I would have thought he was wrong and delusional. I may have even called him stupid but not part of an evil plot to destroy the world. Even without the tragedy in Arizona there are thousands of people dying from assault weapons throughout the country and most of them are young and brown. Would it had really been a socialist plot to kill freedom if the president had mentioned gun control last night? Even if you have ten guns in your home and haven’t murdered anyone, wouldn’t it be understandable if a man that started his public service working in Chicago where there are a lot of issues with gangs and violence just mentioned that gun control and illegal weapons was something we should at least have a discussion about? Maybe he wouldn’t bring it up to destroy the second amendment and come and take everyone’s guns. He could just be concerned with young men dying where he comes from. We have to stop discussing issues like everyone in the country came from the same neighborhood, in the same state with the same amount of money and access.
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