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Fellow Americans,
Please know: I am black; I grew up in the
segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron
Paul's name as my choice for president. Most importantly, I am not race
conscious. I do not require a black president to know that I am a
person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not require a
black president to love the ideal of America.
I cannot join you
in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I
am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For
such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all
that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival -
all that I know about the history of the United States of America, all
that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about
Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the
"change" that Obama asserts has come to America. Most importantly, I
would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to
sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a
century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value
for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection
of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine
depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of
the 12 million blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks
like them (that blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that
they were joined by self-declared "progressive" whites who voted for
him because he doesn't look like them. I would have to be wipe my mind
clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and
taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration -
political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard
University's Kennedy School of Government.
I would have to
believe that "fairness" is equivalent of justice. I would have to
believe that man who asks me to "go forward in a new spirit of service,
in a new service of sacrifice" is speaking in my interest. I would have
to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the
"bottom up," and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into
existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man
who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by
destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.
Finally,
Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of
125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago
irrationally chanting "Yes We Can!" Finally, I would have to wipe all
memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists,
editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism is
dead - and no one, including especially Alan Greenspan, objected to
their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic
mentality that they want to replace with their own version of
anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.
So
you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a
black man to the office of the president of the United States, the
wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane
Fonda is over - and that Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern
must be very happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at
last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare
statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for
having elected a black person. So, toast yourselves: 60s
countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians.
Toast yourselves, Black America. Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton,
Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual
who is qualified to be president, but a black man who, like the
pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to - Do Something! You now have
someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine - what little
there is left - for the chance to feel good. There is nothing in me
that can share your happy obliviousness.
November 6, 2008
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