[Waiting4Celeste]

Can we just agree to disagree and take our views to the polls in November instead of hashing it out here and hurting the feelings of our forum friends??

I think that I could start a list of who will be voting for McCain and who will be voting for Obama just based on responses here. It is pretty obvious that the posts against McCain are coming from the Obama supporters and vice versa. That makes sense, but the rudeness doesn't make sense to me.

I doubt that anyone here will change their whole political views or religion based on reading a post from - essentially - a stranger.

I am just also wondering how much time this thread has taken away from spending time with our families. I see many of you who have posted over and over and over again and I just keep wondering - how do you have that much time on your hands?

Peace, PLEASE!

[Saya]

Good morning all!

I haven't been on since yesterday morning and have just read the thread - these are definitely difficult and divisive issues! I'm glad most people are being respectful!

I don't want to get into a rehash of various positions - at this point most of you know where I stand and whom I'm voting for. But I did want to take an opportunity to "cross party lines" so to speak and support SKL (who I usually disagree with but respect greatly) in re: some of her comments on Obama's race. I don't agree with her specifically saying that he is a "white man with black skin" - it's much more complicated then that - but I don't think he's just "Black" either, and there have been plenty of articles discussing his road towards adopting an African-American identity. Race in America is NOT just skin deep -it is a complicated alchemy of family, culture, and societal perceptions.

This is from a New Yorker article from May 2007 - I think it's a pretty neat description of one bi-racial man's personal search for identity. Sorry, it's a little long:

"When it came time for Obama to leave home he reversed what his mother and father and grandparents had done: he turned around and moved east. First back to the mainland, spending two years of college in California, then farther, to New York. He ended up in Chicago, back in the Midwest, from which his mother’s parents had fled, embracing everything they had escaped—the constriction of tradition, the weight of history, the provincial smallness of community, settling for your whole life in one place with one group of people. He embraced even the dirt, the violence, and the narrowness that came with that place, because they were part of its memory. He thought about the great black migration to Chicago from the South, nearly a century before, and the traditions the migrants had made there. “I made a chain between my life and the faces I saw, borrowing other people’s memories,” he wrote. He wanted to be bound.

. . . In time, the roots would grow. He married Michelle Robinson, a woman who already owned the memories and the roots, who was by birth the person he was trying to become: the child of an intact, religious black family from the South Side. He took a job organizing a South Side community that was disintegrating but that he hoped, through work and inspiration, to revive. Later, rejecting the agnosticism of his parents and his own skeptical instincts, he became a Christian and joined a church. “I came to realize,” he wrote in his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” that “without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but also alone in the same ways that she was ultimately alone.” By the time he arrived at law school, when he was twenty-seven, he had become the man he had imagined. All his life, people had considered him black because he looked black, however confused he might be inside, and now he was no longer confused. His conversion was complete. “If you had met him, you would never get that he was biracial,” Kenneth Mack says. “You would never get that he grew up in Hawaii. When I met him, he just seemed like a black guy from Chicago. He seemed like a Midwestern black man.”

erinelway - LOVE Dawkins on evolution. Read Ancestor's Tale last year - what a beautiful, enthralling, mind-opening book!

[SKL]

Thanks, Saya, for understanding that I didn't mean ill with my comment about how "I" see Obama race-wise.

[Max'smom]

I wanted to add something else for those of you who want to learn more about Obama's values and his attitude toward his family. Earlier, it was claimed that Obama is hiding things from his childhood and earlier life regarding his possible exposure to and perhaps support for "anti-American" beliefs. I recommend that those of you who feel like learning more about his identity search and earlier life read Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, written well before he was running for office and widely available in stores-it provides you with a book length look at his early life; you might also consider as well reading his later Audacity of Hope.
I also want to point out that so far here on the forum the only aspects of his life that have been discussed concern sort of whether or not he is Muslim and how this might have tainted his parenting style as well as attitude toward the US. Obama was my state rep and a professor at my university right before I graduated. He was a highly respected civil rights attorney before serving in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004, one of the best in the country; he commanded great respect from other professors of law with whom he taught. He was also the head of Law Review at Harvard. To rise to those positions you have to be held in high esteem by your peers. We have here a man who in many respects lived the American dream of upward mobility based on merit and who wants to create a county where his children (and other people's children) can also become civil rights lawyers and constitutional law professors regardless of their race or social origins. The family values he represents are based on the American constitution and upholding it - his whole career was based on American civil rights traditions. It doesn't get more American than that.

[KarynB]

I think the problem I had with the whole race thing and how we choose to identify him is that it isn't really our choice to make. How does HE identify himself? Are we open to that, or do we just say "No, you are actually a white guy in brown skin?".

To be, this issue goes further and is much more personal than the next election. Many of us speaking have chosen to adopt transculturally, if not also transracially. What are we going to say to our teenage kids when they self-identify as Guatemalan, Columbian, African etc? "No, your not Guatemalan, you're actually a white girl in brown skin"??? That scares me a lot, and scares me that someone will say that to my boys when they are figuring out how to self-identify.

Obama can handle the criticism, he chose a career that opens him up to that. McCain can handle it too. I disagree with his politics, but think that he is a pretty neat guy in some ways.

And to be honest, I don't think its a waste of time to debate political issues, whether that is online or in person. It can eye-opening and enlightening. I bring what I have learned back to my family and that benefits all of us.

[SKL]

Originally Posted by KarynB

I think the problem I had with the whole race thing and how we choose to identify him is that it isn't really our choice to make. How does HE identify himself? Are we open to that, or do we just say "No, you are actually a white guy in brown skin?".

KarynB, you make a good point. I would note that the reason for my comment (which is in truth how I feel from my perspective) was that I had been accused of being against Obama because he is "black." Nothing could be further from the truth.

Edited to add: the comment was in no way meant as a criticism of Obama. In retrospect, I can see how it could be read that way, since I am aware of blacks sometimes making that statement about other blacks they don't identify with. But my intention here was only to say that my views of him are in no way based on race.

[allerseelen4]

Hey Saya,
I thought that was very cool of you. Thanks for setting a great example for all of us.

[Clare'sMom]

I have never met any of the candidates, I have never met their children...
In public they all seem to be really good parents.
In public I look like a Mom with lots of patients who never yells..... Hahahaha.
I Do Know they are All Really Good Politicians.
Joan Crawford was an academy award winning actress....
however she was a Terrible Mother (Mommy dearest).....

You just never know......

[GAMOM75]

First, let me just say that there is a reason people say religion and politics don't mix. People take voting too personal. As a business owner, I relate picking a president the same as hiring a CFO for our company. I don't care about religion, how many kids someone has, if they are married or divorced, etc. It is not our job to judge these people, we are picking the best person to run our country. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now, that being said some politicians do inject their personal views and religion beliefs on our country. So I guess it is good to know the backgrounds of the candidates.

I think Barack is a great father. I have a daughter the same age as his oldest. I find it great that even in the middle of democratic convention, the girls spoke to their father as if they were home and in front of the TV.

I also think Palin is a good mother, with a great support system. Anyone who can do what she has done, with 5 children in tow...is amazing.

The only issue I have ever had is the fact that if Barak had a pregnant 17 year old, I don't think the people would be as accepting. But that is just a personal opinion.

On religion...if I am not mistaken, Obama says he is christian, not Muslim. But even if he was, would it really matter? Lets not forget that Palin is Pentecostal. That is a very EXTREME religion, some say border line cult. (Before I upset anyone, I just want to say that I grew up in a Pentecostal church so I feel that I can make that claim)
We could also throw in the fact that McCain cheated on his first wife, leaving her with their 3 children after she was in a disfiguring car crash to be with his new much younger wife, Cindy.
The point is, all of these details don't matter. This is not a campaign on morals and family values. Only he who has not sinned can throw the first stone.....

As a republican though, for the first time ever, I am voting democrat. I am voting for Obama.

"He had me at common sense..."