The Obama Conundrum
Michael Lavers blogged from the Center’s inauguration event, Inauguration of President Obama: Witness History at the Center. From the WNYC News Blog:
The Obama Conundrum
By WNYC Newsroom
January 20, 2009
Watching the inauguration at the LGBT Center
WNYC Guest Blogger: Michael Lavers
Outgoing President George W. Bush’s first inauguration in Jan. 20, 2001, seems a distant memory. I was a 19-year-old freshman at the University of New Hampshire. My parents still had their health and I drove a 1989 Mercury Topaz. Things have certainly changed in the last eight years—I order café con leche from the bodegas near my apartment in Bushwick. Employment insecurity and health care costs continue to burden my mother and father. And I am about to witness President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration.
A myriad of questions, reflections and thoughts continue to enter my mind as I think about this watershed moment I am about to experience alongside the rest of the world, but the idea Obama’s presidency will mark the beginning of a post-racial reality intrigues me. As a gay white man who lives in a predominantly Latino (albeit increasingly gentrified) neighborhood, racist, classist and homophobic manifestations remain all too real. Anti-gay slurs scrawled onto advertisements in the subway station near my apartment, the transgender prostitutes who turn tricks on Knickerbocker Avenue to survive another day and the hate crime that tragically took Ecuadorian immigrant José Sucuzhañay’s life last month are among the stark reminders these social ills remain a serious problem. And it will take much more than the inauguration of the country’s first president of color to eradicate them.
Another idea is Obama will immediately solve the country’s innumerable problems. The economy remains in crisis. Health care costs continue to spiral. Guantánamo Bay, Iraq and the Bush administration’s pursuit of unilateral (even cowboy) diplomacy at the arguable expense of human rights have severely tarnished the United States’ image abroad. Americans remain largely cynical towards their elected officials, but many view Obama as some sort of superman who will instantly provide a silver bullet. The incoming commander-in-chief has pragmatically tried to temper some of the admittedly high expectations under which he will take office, but Obama will ultimately disappoint some as an Israeli source correctly noted in a recent interview.
Today ultimately represents change for a country that so desperately needs it. Obama’s inauguration comes at an extremely difficult time for our country, but his optimism and promised leadership are something so many people currently crave. And it is my hope the new administration’s vision for the country includes my parents, my LGBT brothers and sisters, my neighbors in Bushwick and others the outgoing White House repeatedly neglected over the last eight years.
See original post at http://blogs.wnyc.org/news/2009/01/20/the-obama-conundrum/
