As a black man, I cannot lie and say that I wasn’t extra proud when Obama (a half-black man) became President of the Most Powerful Nation in the World. It was nice to finally be able to say to my children “you can be anything you want, even President” and mean it. But what I’m not extra proud of is how he got there and what happened after.
No, this is not an exposė and I’m not implying that he got there by some illegal means. What I’m talking about is the black voters and Obama groupies who became seasonal political analyst during his run and then went back to watching Tyler Perry shows and forgot that there’s still a government out there that’s not meeting our agenda.
I don’t know if you noticed folks, but Obama has not improved the black situation here in America at all. Now the black situation is by no means his fault, but if you let black voters tell it during his campaign you were liable to see one of us on tv bragging about how Obama was going to cure her cancer (hyperbole although one voter did actually believe that Obama was going to pay for her gas and mortgage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P36x8rTb3jI). I’m not saying that the state of America is Obama’s doing either. My issue with this blog isn’t even with Obama (although I do have issues with him, that I will discuss another time). My issue is with all those black people that thought they were auditioning for “Meet the Press” two years ago that have reverted back to political ignorance and not noticed that there’s still a lot of work to be done. My hope was that when Obama went into office it would spark more interests in political matters in my race. While I’m not implying that the average white person is any more politically educated than the average black person, what I do know is they don’t have to be. The people in charge will be a little more concerned about their interests than ours. So we have to be a little extra diligent in staying abreast of what’s going on with our political leaders than white people. I’m not in any way saying that white people love their political leaders. Just that in certain situations (education in urban areas, police governance, etc.) black people have more to think about than their white counterparts when it comes to their public servants’ agendas.
Black people have to get stay active when it comes to paying attention to local and regional politics because believe me, that affects us more than what Obama does on a national level. We need to stay abreast of the views of our congressman because, if you stopped watching CNBC, the climate of the country is changing and people are going to vote in office whoever is screaming “Fuck Obama”. With the rise of the power of the Tea Party and a lot of angry, scared Americans, we could find ourselves back in the Reagan era. Pay attention to who yields the real power in this country, cause it ain’t Obama folks. Its Congress. They’re the ones that declare war. They’re the ones that pass laws. They’re the ones that determine the budgets. They’re the ones whose decisions on a regular basis affects us.
When you watch a political thriller its never the President that’s involved in some scandal. Its always some crazy, greedy senator. There’s a reason for that. Some of them are crazy (cue: Christine O’Donnell) and many of them are greedy (cue: about ½ of them). So learn about your congressman’s or representative’s views. Learn about PAC money, what it is and how it affects your candidate of choice. And then stay active. Its cool to have guilty pleasures like Jersey Shore and Real Housewives of Atlanta. But balance it out with learning about the Real Government of America.
ONE
Here are some websites that I think are the most non-biased and most informative for the average voters.
http://www.congress.org/
http://www.npr.org/
http://www.house.gov/Welcome.shtml
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/
http://www.washingtontimes.com/
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