Posted by Thinker on October 15, 2008 at 07:14:18
In Reply to: Re: Everyone of voting age should read these two books by Barrack O'Bama posted by Concerned on October 14, 2008 at 20:05:00:
If not, I dare you to actually do so before quoting them out of context. Your selective citations NEGLECT quotes to the contrary, EXCLUDE the given context that the wave of these reactionary ideas around him were actually wrong, and OMIT his conclusions that these were thoroughly fruitless ideas to pursue.
I have these books and rather enjoyed reading them. Dreams of My Father is a very thorough and unsentimental self-critique on the journey he embarked on when trying to identify with one side or the other when he was neither, or a mix of both. His dilemma was largely due to internalizing how people saw him -- as a black man even though he was half white. He was addressing the dissonance between the inner and outer self, the crisis in identity, the futility of taking sides in race issues, the phenomenon of being divided between two worlds. It is a journey which concludes in the reconciliation of his divided inheritance.
The Audacity of Hope has a discourse on how complicated real life is for real Americans whose lives as just as "full of contradictions and ambiguities" and how "politics seems to speak so little to what they are going through." He touches on the subject of warring factions and tribal hatreds in a divided nation:
"A government that truly represents these Americans--that serves these these Americans--will require a different kind of politics. That politics will need to reflect our lives as they are actually lived. It won't be pre-packaged, ready to pull off the shelf. It will have to be constructed from the best of our traditions and will have to account for the darker aspects of our past. We will need to understand just how we got to this place, the land of warring factions and tribal hatreds. And we will need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break."
We should all be concerned like you are, but I am not in the slightest bit worried that this good man is the only one able to grasp all the complexities of the nation, as opposed to other politicians who try to fit square problems into round holes.