Changes (David Bowie)

"It's no sin to make a mistake. The sin is when you don't go back and clean it up."

I spoke those words to my brother 23 years ago. He was about to fail his senior year in high school because of a missing phys-ed credit. Long story short, he would oversleep because of his job and then wouldn't go to school because of a mandatory detention policy for late arrivals, which would interfere with his after-school job, so some days he just didn't go. Consequently, he wasn't present enough days to get the gym credit, and was looking at the prospect of being held back a year.

I told him to take summer school. They don't offer summer school for phys-ed.

But I told him the line above, about cleaning up our mistakes, and he went back to school and worked out a plan with them. The school let him put time in at the YMCA, and after enough hours to satisfy them, they would award him his diploma, which he did over the summer.

He made the mistake, and then cleaned it up.

Tuesday night, America cleaned up it's mistakes.

In electing Barack Obama the 44th President of the United States, America said "we are ready to fix things."

We are ready to fully anoint African-Americans, not just with cheap, smiling words, but with a real vote of confidence.

We are ready to turn the wheels of government over to individuals who are knowledgeable, who have studied law, who bring real credentials to the table and are ready to govern.

We are ready to offer the rest of the world the assurance that the country which they all look up to and aspire to be, is ready to stop being a bully and ready to start being a trusted ally again.

As much as I support Barack Obama, it is with much shame that I confess that I found many more reasons to vote against his opponent than I found reasons to support him.

From the beginning, the McCain campaign seemed to be waged for all the wrong reasons.

First of all, why was a wealthy, 72-year-old man with 13 cars and eight houses working so hard to apply for a job? Shouldn't he have been contemplating retirement? I'll tell you why he did it; he got boned by Karl Rove and George W. Bush in South Carolina in 2000, and he's been lying in stealth for eight years waiting for his turn, the turn he felt he was cheated out of. I'm sure the eight years weren't easy, but he spent five years in a P.O.W. camp, so I have no doubts about his tenacity.

But that's the wrong reason to want to be President. Bob Dole ran on that bullshit back in 1996, and Bill Clinton slapped him around.

The Sarah Palin pick as VP? I never saw a campaign shoot itself in the foot more deftly since Al Gore thought it would be a good idea to run a Jewish veep (Joe Lieberman) past the deeply Christian voters of the South (and elsewhere....the 13 states of the Confederacy don't have any monopoly on anti-Semitism). The race for the presidency isn't "Take Your Daughter To Work Day." It would be hard to argue that even a featherweight like J. Danforth Quayle wasn't less qualified than the Governor of Alaska. Could the McCain campaign have been saved by a more savvy pick? Absolutely. He could have chosen one of a plethora of rising young stars on the right, or even an old saw like Elizabeth Dole who was a skillful politician until the voters of North Carolina started to wake up and smell the bullshit. Bobby Jindall could have brought some youth and excitement, Mitt Romney would have brought all of his economically conservative supporters, but McCain had to find someone who would whet the Evangelical's whistle after he basically told them to lick his asshole back in 2000. And snake-charming, speaking in tongues Sarah was that gal. It's too bad that the hypocrisy started piling up faster than the lines on her resume; from Troopergate, to the grandchild being born out of wedlock, to the high-end shopping spree, Caribou Barbie went to just plain old "boo" Barbie.

Finally, the campaign of smear and mud that never seemed to end, was just a bad choice. McCain flung the kitchen sink at Obama, but Barack never responded. It is virtually impossible to win a fight with an enemy that will not engage you. McCain would go into a red-faced rant about Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Socialism, spread the wealth, Joe the Plumber, and so on, and Barack would just smile and shake his head. Like all he had to say was "During the Charles Keating affair, you were the only one with money on the table" and the game is over. But he didn't go there. Obama told the truth, about McCain's lock-step with George W. Bush and the smoldering ruin that he's leaving America. And the American people responded with a hearty "fuck THAT plan."

Well, the smart parts of America did. A glance at the electoral map shows that there are still pockets of resistance to liberals, black people, educated people, or whatever part of voting for Obama you want to isolate. Maybe some folks liked McCain simply based on his military record. If that's the case, John Kerry with his superior military record should have handed W. his National-Guard-but-never-showed-up ass. Maybe some folks voted for McCain simply based on the conservative position on abortion. Fair, but here's a position on abortion I think a lot of people haven't considered, and it happens to be MY position......if two water-heads couldn't figure out a condom in the back seat of Dad's car on prom night, I DON'T WANT THEM RAISING CHILDREN!

Whatever malady is affecting the folks in the South and that strip of states from Texas to North Dakota (fuck you, I've driven through all of them, so I'll name 'em.....Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota....and I did that WITHOUT a map in front of me), whatever the malady is, the good news is that the smart people of America are going to put people and programs in position to help EVERYONE out of the mess that this country has become. EVERYONE. Everyone is going to be a beneficiary of good, smart government that won't allow the economy to tank, won't allow us to squander money we don't have and young people's lives we'd rather keep in futile wars abroad, won't allow an American city to eat Hurricane Dick and wait around four days to do something about it. And I'm talking to you, Louisiana. How much self-loathing do you have to ever vote Republican again? After George Bush left you swimming in your own shit without lifting a finger? If I lived in New Orleans, I'd rather have a finger cut off than vote Republican.

A criticism of the Democratic party by some commentator on the right was that "They always run a lawyer for President. It's never a common person."

Here's a thought. If I'm going to send someone to Washington, the home of national law and government in this country, maybe I'd like to send someone who has STUDIED LAW AND GOVERNMENT. If I want surgery done, I don't bring in a guy who lays carpet, I call a surgeon. If I want my clogged toilet fixed, I don't bring in a guy who grooms poodles, I call a plumber. And If I want economic advice, I call an economist NOT A FUCKING PLUMBER.

This is how frustrated I've become. My candidate won, and I'm still pissed. Still pissed that the election wasn't a clear-cut landslide, like Reagan-Mondale back in 1984, because there are still pockets of folks in our country who still don't get it. But it's O.K. Because folks like me stepped up and did the right thing, folks like them will get universal health care, decent wages for jobs, a country that is released from the grip of foreign oil, better social standing in the world, and the residual positivity of some racial healing.

And by the way, the flip-side of that racial healing thing is that the bar has been WAY lifted for black folk in America. The old arguments about inequalities and access to opportunity just won't hold anymore. Obama grew up without his father, worked his ass off, and became President of the Harvard Law Review (no small achievement), United States Senator, and now President of the United States. I want to hear "Yes We Can" echoing through the black community for the rest of my life. There's really no reason that I shouldn't hear it, anyway. We've come too far to turn back now.

So I applaud a post-racial America, an America that no longer considers intellectualism to be a bad thing, an America that's ready to build on that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton built and George W. Bush burned. I'm girding myself for the hounding attacks that will surely come from the Right, now that they have a villain to coalesce around. Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly and the rest have four years of material ready to go, and if they try to tear down Obama like they did Bill Clinton, it won't surprise me at all. The only exception being that if they try that shit with Obama, his wife Michelle will be WAY more likely than Hillary to kick off her heels, take her jewelry off, and start kicking a little ass.

In real life, and to be serious to close this up, I have a bi-racial family. My wife is of mixed heritage, and based on our backgrounds, my daughter is Italian, African-American, Isle of St. Croix, and German. She goes to a school that is mostly minority (oxymoron?) and even though she is aware of the difference in races, she perceives no difference in the races, other than the color of their skin. And she's four. And none of her classmates think anything of it, either. Can it be that children are smarter than the voters of Alabama? And white Americans over the age of 65? I'm in Birmingham, Alabama right now, and I know damn well, somewhere in the city today, some cracker asshole made a joke about the huge Obama headline in the paper this morning and everyone getting excited because a black man got a job. And it still galls the piss out of me.

Those racial wounds are old and deep. But they're scabbing up. And one day, they'll dry up and fall off.

God Bless America.

Ralph Tetta
Rochester, NY

did anyone catch why I used a David Bowie song?