Cameron Turner
*It is fitting that President Obama’s second inauguration will take place on Martin Luther King Day.
Even more than his revolutionary White House win in 2008, Obama’s re-election represents the fulfillment of the Dr. King’s dream of a racially just nation. The rage of a prominent racist pundit proves that.
The day after President Obama was voted back into the White House, Pat Buchanan – the uber-conservative known for racially incendiary rhetoric – phoned right wing radio host G. Gordon Liddy and lamented: “White America died last night. Obama’s reelection killed it. Our 200 plus year history as a Western nation is over.” Buchanan told Liddy that he had “cried for hours” after the November 6 election and then bemoaned: “It’s over for all of us. The great white nation will never survive another four years of Obama’s leadership.”
Ironically, I take comfort in Buchanan’s insulting racist rant. Because he’s right (though not for the reason he thinks) and that’s a good thing.
Buchanan is dead wrong when he claims that white Americans as a group are doomed because a black President is returning to the Oval Office. (Buchanan’s suggestion is not only racist but it is laughably illogical considering President Obama’s populist domestic policies which have benefited Americans across all demographics.) But the old America in which white men held absolute power — and used that power to dominate, restrict, oppress and brutalize people of color, women, immigrants, non-Protestants and other so-called minorities – is dead. Thanks to the freedom fighters who labored and sacrificed on all levels of U.S. society the original, white supremacist America has been dying for decades. And, as the teary-eyed Buchanan pointed out, the second election of Barack Obama was the kill shot.
When they went to the polls last November 6, voters didn’t simply choose a President. They chose a direction, a definition for the nation. In re-electing President Obama, a majority of the American people confirmed their commitment to an inclusive United States that draws strength from its diversity and defends the rights of all its citizens. By bestowing the Presidency on Mr. Obama a second time, Americans rejected the rage, race-baiting and and divisiveness of the Tea Party and birther conservatives whose rallying cry of “I want my country back” reflects a tragic paranoia about the expanding racial, ethnic, gender and socio-economic multiplicity of our great nation.
That’s why Pat Buchanan spent election night crying.
Of course racism – both individual and institutional – still exists in our nation but it no longer enjoys the sanction of law, federal policy and social acceptability. Racism is no longer a mainstream American value.
Pat Buchanan’s America is gone. And it’s never coming back. Never again will the Land of the Free be a place where the denial of freedom is legally protected and socially permitted.
I suspect that Pat Buchanan and his ilk will shed more tears and spew more bigotry next Monday (January 21st), as President Obama takes the oath of office for the second time. But we who believe in liberty and justice for all will spend Monday celebrating the that Martin Luther King’s dream has taken root and is yielding the fruit of a new and great America that will, finally and fully, live out the true meaning of its creed.
I’m Cameron Turner and that’s my two cents.
Drop Cameron an email at TurnersTwoCents@yahoo.com and see his video commentaries at www.EURweb.com and YouTube.com/TurnersTwoCents.
Dear Mr. Turner:
After reading your article, I decided to give a brief response. First, much of what you’ve written in terms of America and men like Pat Buchanan is absolute nonsense! Amazingly, you think that America has moved to this “anything goes” position on various issues when she has clearly not. Believe me, Mr. Pat Buchanan isn’t the problem in America, and especially as it relates to Black America.
The problem with Black America is Black America! Our people suffer untold suffering due to lack of leadership, lack of vision, a desire to have it all right now, and the gross failure of Black men and consequently Black families. An example of this is yourself! Why aren’t you with your children’s Mother? As a man that is proud to be Black, how did you let your family fall apart and leave your children to have to grow up in a one-parent home?
Men like Mr. Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, and other conservative Whites are not the problem with why we kill each other, disrepsect and abuse our women, drop out of school, choose section 8 over work, lay down with various men and have tons of children that we are not ready to parent, no vision for the future, the high divorce rate among our people, and spend our entire days blaming the White man! It is not until we take responsibility for our own lives, that we will ever rise up and reach our God given potential.