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Nov. 3, 2008 From the slave ships to the blistering cotton fields of the South. From the fight for desegregation and enfranchisement to the battles for affirmative action black Americans have been dreaming and that, has been the cardinal problem. This may be my last JFK, MLK, Obama speech that is, before the day comes upon us. Maybe I just made this discovery or may be just like the teeming millions of fellow black Americans- brothers I could not see clearly even though the rain was gone. Since Martin Luther King made that historic oratorical breath taking gem of a speech ‘I Have A Dream’, blacks Americans have literally hug onto the speech in every sense of the word but refusing absolutely to actually live ‘The Dream’ content. Having moved up from eating fried pork skin to eating pork and lamp chops, with the partial lifting of the racial curtain- more a case of a veil, blacks became content and lackadaisical firing themselves once a while with a relisten to the ‘I Have A Dream’ speech and trooping out for million man marches , the quietly unconscious anthem being ‘Old man river, Old man river…’, always content to keep on rowing, never for once thinking how good an idea it would be to handle the rudder. It was a feel good factor- “one day we will”! And so it was that the dreaming went on and on, it became a ‘slumber of reason’ which according to Goya ‘breeds monsters’. Black Americans resigned themselves to speech not the substance of the speech which refused to accept status quo believing of penultimate change. And so it was that once upon a time like all things American, apple pie, prom queen and base ball a great innovator saw an opportunity to take a patent on an idea no (other) black though it possible for no solid and scientific reason. That person is Barak Obama, a black man with traceable roots’ dreamt the dream and decided to wake up from the reverie and taste it and what a rush! This race for the White House is, and, I have always maintained an opportunity for America to for once practice what it propounds through diplomatic missions and gunboats off foreign shores that inclusiveness should not just be a preserve of a few but that the ‘Old Glory’ can accommodate other shapes of hue and opinion just the same not just white stripes and starry eyes. Transition has never been easy but the gospel is that pliable, objective minds (sets) allow for what will be seen and felt to be meaningful transition. 9/11 revealed what many Americans could not in a rational thought process conceive – that America could bleed at home, but it happened and the subsequent aftermaths. If the expected change is prevented from happening and status quo remains then America most brace itself for the worst. Mean while it is time to stop asking “when I get to talk turkey and talk turkey”!
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