Did I slip down the rabbit hole without realizing it?

Of COURSE race is an issue in this campaign. HOW COULD IT POSSIBLY NOT BE? We're talking about electing the first black president ever. If electing black people to high office in the land was an everyday occurrence, then I would agree that the discussion of race is inappropriate. The fact that he's the first demonstrates, BY DEFINITION, that we've got a problem here. The fact that we try to not ever, ever, ever, ever mention the subject of race shows how squirrelly we are on the whole subject.

Gene Robinson had it exactly right on MSNBC last night: of course Obama will talk about being black. He's black! What's wrong with that, exactly?

He's also skinny and he talks about that too, but you don't see fat people screaming about him playing the weight card.

The problem is that we white people are just not in touch with how much OUR conversations are shaped by our racial experiences. We say "society" when we mean "white society." We say "culture" when what we really mean is "white culture." We say "black people" pretty easily, but God forbid anyone ever employs the parallel construction, "white people." "Black people" is just descriptive. "White people" is playing the race card. I could go on and on, but anyone who thinks we do not have some racial craziness in our national dna is either a liar or stupid. And anyone who thinks for a nanosecond that the Republicans aren't going to do everything they can to (hopefully, subtly) play to racial prejudices in this campaign has swallowed a gallon of the GOP KoolAid. Sorry.

What we need to do is to look at this as an opportunity to learn from each other and, for possibly the first time ever in our nation's history, make major breakthroughs in race relations. This would require black Americans to speak their truth--not accuse, blame or cry victim, but simply say look, here's the unvarnished truth about the way it is to grow up black in America. And white Americans need to shut up and listen, and I mean TRULY listen, with a heart open to the possibility that there might be something that they/we do not know about the experiences of black Americans, something we can learn from them that will make a difference for all of us. And the first step in that is to stop being so damn defensive. No, I never enslaved a black person in my life, but it would be just plain crazy to deny the reality of my upbringing, to refuse to acknowledge that, despite the best of intentions of my loved ones, I grew up in a racist culture and possibly soaked up some of those attitudes and beliefs. If I accept that, then I am open to the possibility of learning and changing. But denial leads to status quo.

Obama said just a few weeks ago:

“They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. ‘He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?’

Why is anyone surprised? The Obama campaign did the same thing to the Clintons in the primary.

In the primary, any challenge to Obama's voting record, experience, or constituency was hysterically, and incorrectly, called racist by the Obama campaign and the media. Don't forget that the whites who didn't vote for Obama were called racists, too.

Of course, the 90+% of blacks who voted for Obama were allowed to do so without any charges of racism. Same for the lunatic rantings of the crazies from Trinity Church; no racists there!

Good for McCain for calling it out!

but is about a culture, a collective conscious, that could astoundingly construct an over-achieving, fibbing, church-going boy and a cognitively impaired, criminally disordered adolescent male as “candidates” or potential “leader”, then distract itself from that pathology by arguing over which of them engaged first in name-calling.

You mean, now that the Clinton campaign has folded its tent?

John McCain has already used racial imagery when he attacks Barack Obama on the campaign stump. When John McCain attacks Barack Obama’s policies McCain often uses the phrase; “Obama does not seem to understand” which is a subtle insertion of racism. Instead of saying that he differs with Obama on policy, philosophy or ideas McCain asserts that Obama does not have the inherent intelligence to understand how the world works and McCain does.

Saying that Obama does not understand matters is reminiscent of the descriptions foisted on blacks that suggested childlike mental inferiority. This characterization of mental inferiority was used to justify slavery, segregation and discrimination. McCain is trying say that Obama, a Harvard law school graduate, has childlike mental capacities like all black do when he speaks to his nearly all white audiences.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected but some things never seem to change. The "Irish" (not really) were easily duped by JFK's grandfather, the man called "Honey Fitz" because of his sweet-tongued charm. He was just a local politician and a "chancer" like so many politicians are but when he met any voter in Boston he could win with his wiles, he was always up to speed. If the voter told oul' Honey Fitz that his grandparents came from Co. Mayo, then Honey's did too; if the voter made a claim to Co. Clare heritage, Honey was ready for that also....so on and so forth.

The REAL Irish owe America nothing. The potato comes from the Americas (Peru perhaps) and it wasn't eaten in Ireland until well into the l7th century when dispossesion by you-know-who denied the indigenous population ownership of rivers, lakes, woodlands which had been a valuable source of food. The potato blight of the l840s was borne by a fungus of American origin but I've neither the time nor the inclination to give the facts on that now. The only Americans who sent any financial aid to the starving over here were the Choctaw Indians. We got nothing from Idaho, the American potato capital, and as for the East Coast that place was full of WASPS.

I'm tired of hearing about the Kennedys. I don't feel the earth move but I'm grateful to Senator George Mitchell of Maine who did more to calm the sectarian mess in Northern Ireland (at the behest of Bill Clinton) than any of the Kennedys ever did.