Monday, January 19, 2009

The Hope




Tomorrow, Barack Hussein Obama. the guy no one knew four years back will be the 44th President of USA. For some he is a savior, for some the ultimate ray of hope, some feel he will bring the change they always wished! Personally I don’t know how he becoming the President changes my life or anyone I know!!

Anyways on late night Saturday, I was having a similar discussion with my friends and our discussion moved towards two points. A) Would US have voted for a Black president in the Eighties; in other words has average Joe’s perspective against Black changed in the last 20 years and B) Will educated American look at Black’s in a different perspective.

As usual, there was a healthy discussion with all the quotations from CNN. MSNBC and FOX and most of us believed nothing has change or will change.
At this point “the intellect” who is always a healthy participant in discussion, but has moderate views, and never gets exited to a point where words start coming out faster than normal conversation gave an exciting speech which turned the tables.
His view- passionate,
His choice of words- articulate
His belief - truthful
In a way his argument had the same effect what Obama’s speech in 2004 had on Americans. No one could oppose it!!

I will not divulge in his views on question (A) but will jump to the second question… “Will Obama change the way people look at Black's ?"
He believed that Americans will give Black’s a chance because of Obama. The reasoning was, we generally don’t know about other culture(s) and have a pre-conceived thought about them. However if we come in contact with someone belonging to the other culture our pre-conceived thoughts are broken and we see the whole community in a different perspective. For example today as an Indian, We know very little about Mexicans. What we have pre-conceived is that the community is a cheap labor force in USA and most of them are illegal immigrants! (How much of that is true we don’t know) Now let's say tomorrow we have kids, and they go to school, and have Mexican friends, who visit our house, then we will learn something about them and not see them only as a three bucks an hour labor force.
Using this example he explained that most Americans will give blacks a second chance. Learning about their president they will learn something about the other community and will break their pre-conceived ideas.
I know, my writing does not do justice to his argument, but if you had listened to this guy you would agree with me that there was no opposition.
It was a speech, which for a blink made me believe “Change has arrived” and maybe tomorrow with Obama taking the oath somehow my life will also be affected!

God Bless America!

-Purvin