No time for complacency

Maya Angelou, guest columnist, says there's no time for complacency

The beauty of living to be my age and still having clear vision is that it allows me to look back and see how far we’ve come. Yet even if we live to be 100, we can scarcely perceive the magnitude of our progress as a country.


But North Carolina, I tell you: we have progressed.

I once debated with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. about whether an African American would ever be elected president. He believed it would happen within the next 40 years at the time; I believed it would never happen within my lifetime. I have never been happier to have been proven wrong.

And since Barack Obama’s historic election, under unforgiving economic circumstances and in the face of the unyielding opposition once in office, we have made remarkable progress as a country, together.

He rescued our economy from a depression and is leading us toward greater shared prosperity. He expanded educational opportunity for our students, from Head Start investments to Pell Grant scholarships. For women, he is leveling the playing field in the pay we receive for the work we do, and protecting our rights to make health-care decisions that are right for us. And he kept his promise to provide every family with access to quality, affordable health insurance, including the 1.5 million North Carolinians who are currently uninsured.

But as Rev. King wrote, “all progress is precarious.” The progress made by one president can be easily rolled back by the next. And that means voting is not just important. It is imperative.

In 2008, we helped President Obama win North Carolina by just 14,000 votes — just five votes per precinct. Every one of us can think of five people whose vote could have meant the difference. And believe it or not, this year will be even closer. So there is no time for complacency. We must make our voices heard.

Just imagine waking up the day after the election, knowing that you did not register and did not vote and the progress we’ve made slipped through our fingertips. You’d kick yourself. You’d bang your head against the wall. Let me spare you that self-admonition.

The good news is that you don’t have to wait until Election Day to vote. From Oct. 18 until Nov. 3, early vote locations will be open across North Carolina. During that time, you can register to vote and cast your ballot all in the same place on the same day. Early voting is that simple and convenient. And once you vote, you can focus on getting your friends and family and neighbors to the polls, always going back and ushering another to the ballot. That is how progress is made.

But if you can’t vote early, make sure you still vote on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 6, when polls will be open across the state from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Just visit Vote.BarackObama.com for all the information you need about where, when and how to vote.

And when you fill out that ballot, remember it is because of our right to vote that we’ve seen such a magnitude of progress in our country.

We are here in direct relation to the heroes and she-roes who paid with their lives for this right. Many of us are old enough to remember what it felt like to be told we could not register to vote without taking a test or paying a poll tax. Some were asked how many angels danced on a head of a pin, how many bubbles were in a bar of soap.

We are here because four courageous college freshmen sat down at a lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960, four years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, to make a stand for equality. It’s a terrible thing to obstruct access to the ballot. But we follow all those who had the courage to dare to live so we can dare to live. Because of them, we are here.

So vote to keep moving us forward. And carry with you your friends, family and neighbors. Carry them from your congregations, your beauty salons and barbershops, your sororities and fraternities. Carry with you those five people whose vote could make the difference.

You may be pretty or plain, heavy or thin, gay or straight, poor or rich. But nobody has more votes than you. All human beings are more equal to each other than they are unequal. And voting is the great equalizer.

It is important. It is imperative. There is no time for complacency.

Maya Angelou is a poet and activist who lives in Winston-Salem.

Countdown America

FB / Internet full of political statements !!

How many days to 2012 election...??? ???

"Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later. 

And as president, one of the things I’ve learned is you can’t do that. That, you know, it’s important for you to make sure that the statements that you make are backed up by the facts. And that you’ve thought through the ramifications before you make ‘em." ~ President Barack Obama

Who thinks Clint Eastwood did a fine job?

By LAWRENCE DOWNES

Who thinks Clint Eastwood did a fine job?

August 31, 2012, 1:11 PM

The Man in the Empty Chair

Go ahead and snicker about how last night’s eagerly awaited surprise convention speech by a Hollywood legend turned out to be an 11-minute ramble by a rumple-haired guy, 82 years old, talking without notes to an imaginary Barack Obama in an empty chair.

An imaginary Barack who tells Mr. Eastwood several times to shut up, then tells him and Mitt Romney to do an unspeakable thing to themselves.

Yes, it was very unexpected. But memorable! And the perfect distillation of the Republican campaign.

Mitt Romney doesn’t use a chair. But he, too, is having a pretend argument with an invented friend, Imaginary Barack. Imaginary Barack who apologizes for America. Who hates business and rich people. Who robs Medicare, closes auto factories, kowtows to the Chinese. Who is the sole reason for the soaring national debt, high unemployment, the housing bust, etc., etc.

To Republicans, the president has been a mystery creature for a while. Think back to 2008: Remember the right-wing, talk-radio bafflement about Mr.Obama’s rise. Who is this guy, they asked? Why don’t we know anything about him? When the cipher beat John McCain, disbelief turned to fury.

The last four years have been an extended exercise in Republican denialism: This cannot be. This isn’t happening. If you’re really the president, show us your papers.

Imaginary Barack was invented in Hawaii, sneaked into the Oval Office, and has no legitimate claim on the presidency. As for the real tall black guy posing in Washington, go ahead and treat him any way you want. You can jab your finger in his face, shout him down, call him a Muslim, a Kenyan, an illegal alien, you can invent all kinds of lies about him and then you can tell him – get out of that chair.

In reality, the president is a more-or-less mainstream, smarter-than-average pol, left-of-center on some things, to the right on others, like guns, disturbingly hawkish on ordering the killing of American citizens suspected of terrorism, on national security, executive secrecy and immigration. He is, too, an inveterate compromiser who used to bend over backward to make deals — sometimes in advance! — with Republicans.

But that guy is not as scary as Imaginary Barack.

Luvin the Political Discussion....2012

Wow,,,, Mrs Obama

Whatever Obama’s other triumphs, arguably his greatest has been an expansion of the black imagination to encompass this: the idea that a man can be culturally black and many other things also—biracial, Ivy League, intellectual, cosmopolitan, temperamentally conservative, presidential.

It is often said that Obama’s presidency has given black parents the right to tell their kids with a straight face that they can do anything. This is a function not only of Obama’s election to the White House but of the way his presidency broadcasts an easy, almost mystic, blackness to the world. TheObama family represents our ideal imagining of ourselves—an ideal we so rarely see on any kind of national stage.

Reference link....

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/fear-of-a-black-president/309064/#.UDWo_GI1lBs.facebook

My President Obama

Obama is not simply America’s first black president—he is the first president who could credibly teach a black-studies class. He is fully versed in the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X. Obama’s two autobiographies are deeply concerned with race, and in front of black audiences he is apt to cite important but obscure political figures such as George Henry White, who served from 1897 to 1901 and was the last African American congressman to be elected from the South until 1970. But with just a few notable exceptions, the president had, for the first three years of his presidency, strenuously avoided talk of race. 

But despite Obama’s post-election reluctance to talk about race, he has always displayed both an obvious affinity for black culture and a distinct ability to defy black America’s worst self-conceptions.

The perfect statement of the Obama era, a time marked by a revolution that must never announce itself, by a democracy that must never acknowledge the weight of race, even while being shaped by it. Barack Obama governs a nation enlightened enough to send an African American to the White House, but not enlightened enough to accept a black man as its president.

By virtue of his background—the son of a black man and a white woman, someone who grew up in multiethnic communities around the world—Obama has enjoyed a distinctive vantage point on race relations in America. Beyond that, he has displayed enviable dexterity at navigating between black and white America, and at finding a language that speaks to a critical mass in both communities. He emerged into national view at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, with a speech heralding a nation uncolored by old prejudices and shameful history. There was no talk of the effects of racism. Instead Obama stressed the power of parenting, and condemned those who would say that a black child carrying a book was “acting white.” He cast himself as the child of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas and asserted, “In no other country on Earth is my story even possible.” When, as a senator, he was asked if the response to Hurricane Katrina evidenced racism,Obama responded by calling the “ineptitude” of the response “color-blind.”

Before Barack Obama, the “black president” lived in the African American imagination as a kind of cosmic joke, a phantom of all that could never be. White folks, whatever their talk of freedom and liberty, would not allow a black president. They could not tolerate Emmett’s boyish gaze. Dr. King turned the other cheek, and they blew it off. White folks shot Lincoln over “nigger equality,” ran Ida Wells out of Memphis, beat Freedom Riders over bus seats, slaughtered Medgar in his driveway like a dog. The comedian Dave Chappelle joked that the first black president would need a “Vice President Santiago”—because the only thing that would ensure his life in the White House was a Hispanic president-­in-waiting. A black president signing a bill into law might as well sign his own death certificate.  When Chappelle tried to imagine how a black George W. Bush would have justified the war against Saddam Hussein, his character (“Black Bush”) simply yelled, “The nigger tried to kill my father!”

The irony of Barack Obama is this . .

: he has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being “clean” (as Joe Biden once labeled him)—and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches. This irony is rooted in the greater ironies of the country he leads. For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government. In warring against that paradox, African Americans have historically been restricted to the realm of protest and agitation. But when President Barack Obama pledged to “get to the bottom of exactly what happened,” he was not protesting or agitating. He was not appealing to federal power—he was employing it. The power was black—and, in certain quarters, was received as such.

No amount of rhetorical moderation could change this. It did not matter that the president addressed himself to “every parent in America.” His insistence that “everybody [pull] together” was irrelevant. It meant nothing that he declined to cast aspersions on the investigating authorities, or to speculate on events. Even the fact that Obama expressed his own connection to Martin in the quietest way imaginable—“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”—would not mollify his opposition. It is, after all, one thing to hear “I am Trayvon Martin” from the usual placard-waving rabble-rousers. Hearing it from the commander of the greatest military machine in human history is another.

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye. Hence the old admonishments to be “twice as good.” Hence the need for a special “talk” administered to black boys about how to be extra careful when relating to the police. And hence Barack Obama’s insisting that there was no racial component to Katrina’s effects; that name-calling among children somehow has the same import as one of the oldest guiding principles of American policy—white supremacy. The election of an African American to our highest political office was alleged to demonstrate a triumph of integration. But when President Obama addressed the tragedy of Trayvon Martin, he demonstrated integration’s great limitation—that acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black. And even then, full acceptance is still withheld. T

77 days from Election 2012

Women still earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn. Today, 77 days away from Election Day, stand with the candidate who’s fighting for fair pay: http://OFA.BO/2tCDpc

We’re 77 days from the election. Women still earn only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. Now’s the time to stand with the candidate who’s fighting for equal pay:http://ofa.bo/rUxHuC

Barack Obama Quotes

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Rape and Lynching in America!

Missouri Rep. Todd Akin made the nation's collective jaw drop on Sunday with the comment that "legitimate rape" victims rarely get pregnant because they have "ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

Paul Ryan and 225 of your fellow Republican co-sponsors played around with the word rape . .  suggesting only "forcible" rape be treated seriously as if all rapes weren't forcible.    For women,  it brings back a flood of memories of the way the rapists played with us in the act of being raped -- intimidating us, threatening us,muting us. Your playing with words like "forcible" and "legitimate" is playing with our souls which have been shattered by unwanted penises shoving into us, ripping our flesh, our vaginas, our consciousness, our confidence, our pride, our futures.

Now Mr. Todd Akin - - - wants to say that he misspoke when he said that a legitimate rape couldn't get us pregnant. Did you honestly believe that rape sperm is different than love sperm, that some mysterious religious process occurs and rape sperm self-destructs due to its evilcontent?  

Mr Aiken  used the expression "legitimate" rape as if to imply there were such a thing as "illegitimate" rape. Let me try to explain to you- - -  what that does to the minds, hearts and souls of the millions of women on this planet who experience rape. It is a form of re-rape. The underlying assumption of your statement is that women and their experiences are not to be trusted. That their understanding of rape must be qualified by some higher, wiser authority. It delegitimizes and undermines and belittles the horror, invasion, desecration they experienced. It makes them feel as alone and powerless as they did at the moment of rape.

I am asking you and the GOP to get out of my body, out of my vagina, my womb, to get out of all of our bodies. These are not your decisions to make. These are not your words to define.

Why don't you spend your time ending rape rather than redefining it? Spend your energy going after those perpetrators who so easily destroy women rather than parsing out manipulative language that minimizes their destruction.

And by the way you've just given millions of women a very good reason to make sure you never get elected again, and an insanely good reason to rise.

#ReasonToRise

Eve Ensler
Bukavu, Congo

Todd Akin’s comments

The President responds to Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin’s comments about victims of "legitimate rape." Say you stand with the candidate who trusts women to make our own health care decisions: http://ofa.bo/M2QN38

Less than 100 days to ELECTION 2012

Where’s Gabby’s Dad? He’s Right Where He’s Supposed to Be

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