Yesterday was a rough day so I was in no mood to write. I already have a heavy heart as I am watching my mother suffer with the disease of leukemia and my father's abilities deteriorate as he copes with a devastating neurological disease.
Yesterday, we had another blow. My father in law died and the family, of course, gathered at the home of my mother in law. He was a good and decent man, a man who served in the army during World War II, working on military aircraft. He met my mother in law then, and they had been married for sixty-four years. He was a fireman for most of his working life, and mostly because of that, two of his sons became firemen. He and my mother in law raised six children together, all of whom are upstanding citizens and good human beings. My husband is the eldest, and was inspired to became a civil engineer partly because that was something his father would have liked to be. He and his father shared an intertest in science, math and engineering.
The next few days will mostly be focused on family and so I won't be doing much writing, but something happened this morning that made me incredibly sad, especially when I put it into the focus of life's many tragedies.
After getting home late last night, my husband and I dragged ourselves to a local coffee shop this morning to have breakfast. We'd hoped to just relax and plan out the next few days, including getting airline tickets for our sons to fly down for the funeral. We sat in a booth next to a man and three women (all in their seventies, it seemed) who were having a loud conversation about the election and the current financial crisis. The man was holding his own little seminar, spewing his Rush Limbaugh-esque talking points to the women who seemed to be deferring to him. Everything was about "the blacks." The financial crisis was the fault of "the blacks" because, according to him, the Democrats and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had given all those sub-prime loans to "the blacks." "The blacks" in Chicago had been conspiring for years to put up one of their own for the presidency and they had been grooming Obama to run. "The blacks" were going to take over. It had all been a plot.
My husband and I stared at them, unable to believe there were actually people in our neighborhood who could be this vocally and publicly racist. When the waitress came by, we asked to move. She asked if there was anything wrong with the table, and I told her I simply couldn't enjoy my breakfast sitting next to racists. I don't know if they heard me, but I didn't whisper it.
Soon they left, and a lovely African American family with two small children walked past them as they filed out. I thought it only fitting, and I was happy that the family didn't have to hear their bile. I did notice as they left that one of the three women was wearing a gigantic cross. How lovely, I thought sarcastically. How "Christian."
My father in law was a Republican, having changed his party affiliation after my mother in law, who has a strong libertarian streak, convinced him he shouldn't be a Democrat. We have had many heated debates in the family over politics, but one thing I know for sure. The good and decent man who left this world on Thursday would never have had such a conversation as I overheard today, in public or in private. He may not have voted for Obama, but he was not a racist, and his vote would have been ideological.
When you stop for just a minute and think, you realize that we all suffer the same pain of loving and saying good-bye to those people we love. Whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, it doesn't matter. We all suffer terrible grief at one point or another. Barack Obama never really knew his father, and lost his mother to cancer when he was in his thirties. Just because he is a different color does not make him or his feelings any different than those people sitting at that table in the diner.
How dare they talk the way they talked! How dare they think the way they think! How dare they have such disregard for the people in the diner who heard them, people like us who are feeling grief and sorrow. Their utter disregard for anyone who heard their bile was simply a sacrilege.
I will give anyone $100 who can prove to me that Barack Obama or anyone on his staff, for that matter, ever said anything so vile and despicable about "the whites" as these four said today about Barack Obama and African Americans. I'm not worried I'll lose any money. No one in Barack's campaign would stoop this low.
White citizens, like those four, disgrace themselves and a certain segment of the population. Yet Barack, who is as much white as he is black, knows there are many white people who are not racists. Let's hope they are soon relics of the past.
Both of my parents are Republicans. Both have sent in their absentee ballots and both told me they voted for Obama. (My father hasn't voted for president for sixteen years - he didn't like Clinton and he didn't like Bush, but Obama won him over.) My father, however, fears Obama won't win because of people of his generation. "You may have to wait until we are all dead," he told me a while back, "before someone like Obama can be elected."
I hope both he and my mother live to see that he is wrong. I hope the four people I overheard today are already outnumbered by people who are more intelligent than they are. Once Obama is elected and is a fine president, I hope they remember their words and are profoundly ashamed.
