President Trump is inspiring my daughter to read

Youngest Daughter is not yet a fan of reading. She'll get there in time, but for right now it's more fun for her to watch a short show, play a game, or draw than it is to read a storybook.

On Wednesday evening. she asked if she could watch something on Netflix. I want her to practice her reading at least, so I use shows as a carrot.

"You have to read a book first," I told her.

"Do I have to?" she asked in that way that is common to 7-year-olds.

"Which president do you want to be like, President Obama or President Trump?" I asked her.

"President Obama," she said.

"Which president do you think reads more?"

She didn't even argue. She just went, picked up a stack of books, and started reading.

I think I found a bright side to the Trump presidency.



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


Tweet


Psst! I totally stole this from Brucker.

interesting point

As the presidential race has been playing, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been touting her experience as a governor as a reason to vote for the Republican ticket.

In contrast, she points out that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama has been running on his roots as a community organizer. While he's been a U.S. senator for two years, he has no experience as an executive, and this makes him unqualified.

Someone recently made an intriguing observation, though: Jesus was a community organizer. Pontius Pilate was a governor.

Which of those two do you have a higher opinion of?

This is why I support Barack Obama (and why you should too)

I can't speak for anyone else and why she's so taken with Barack Obama, but here are a few of the things that I like:

1. He has a track record of working for the dispossessed in inner-city Chicago.
2. He has a proven history of working with people from both sides of the aisle. I've noticed that he hasn't engaged in any of the personal attacks that have come from the Republican corner. Character assassination becomes no one, and it is especially not desired in a president.
3. He actually listens to advisers when they tell him things contrary to what he thinks.
4. He realizes that our nation has lost a lot of international standing in the past eight years and that the old days are over. We can no longer get what we want because we're America.
5. It's true he opposed the surge in Iraq, which Sen. McCain supported and which apparently has quelled a lot of the unrest there. On the other hand, he also didn't support invading a sovereign nation without provocation, plunging an entire country into chaos, and destabilizing the entire region.*
6. Obama favors moving the United States to greater energy independence. This is a matter of national security, as well as environmental security, and industrial and economic well-being. Remember, he has called for developing a Green Belt here in America, developing sustainable industry to take the place of the Rust Belt that languished and fell apart under the efforts set up by the Reagan and subsequent administrations of "Let businesses go and they'll do what's best." (Which they did -- for the bottom line, which involved moving outside the U.S. and laying off thousands of workers.)
7. As thrilled as I am that the Republicans finally have nominated a woman for the vice presidency, let me point out that should anything happen to Obama, Biden has a strong political resume and presumably would make a viable replacement. Palin's resume is too thin to say the same should anything happen to McCain.

On those things that may concern others:

1. He is not a Muslim. Even if he were, that is neither cause for alarm, nor even for concern. If this is a concern, please get over it.
2. Yes, he is black. That is an asset. Our past 43 presidents have all come from positions of power, wealth, influence and uncounted privilege, and to some extent that's had to affect foreign policy. Obama has had to deal with the downside of America. He's been subject to racism, he's had to prove his worth time and again, and he's done it. In fact, he just recently paid off his college loans. Do you really think that a man who's had to prove himself so many times is just going to assume that the world will do what we wants, should he become president?
3. Also true, his experience at the national level is limited. The issue here isn't experience as much as it is wisdom and willingness to listen to qualified advisers. Obama has plenty of experience at organizing people, building consensus, and getting things done in an above-board manner.
   
   Are people that different at the world stage? Small-minded people remain small-minded whether they work at the city clerk's office, the foreign consulate, or the Grand Assembly. Obama knows how to connect with people, just like George W, Bush doesn't and Ronald Reagan did. Bush also has had great advisers, like Colin Powell, but he doesn't know how to connect with people, and he's ignored advisers when he disagrees with them. Look how that's turned out.
4. Yes, he's "liberal." I wish I knew what people meant by that these days, though, because it seems to an empty pejorative any more. Bush is billed as a conservative, even though he's gone on runaway spending sprees without a plan on how to pay for them, and he's engaged in nation-building of the worst possible sort.
   
   And my mother, God bless her, criticizes Obama for being liberal and yet she's voiced support in the past for abortion and physician-assisted suicide while laying claim to being a conservative. (On the former, at least, she agrees with Obama's stated position, if not McCain's, and Obama's position anyway is "We all want fewer of them, so let's work together.")

* Edited to add: Actually, he voted against funding for the troop when there was no timeline set for their withdrawal. McCain also voted against funding, when there was a timeline attached. Therefore it is just as accurate to say that McCain voted against the surge. And in any event, the real successes there seem to have flowed from the Sunni tribal leaders who have broken with the insurgency and with al Qaeda in Iraq, and not from any increase in U.S. troops.

when your parents just don't seem to get it

It's a difficult thing when your parents forget some of the moral lessons they worked so hard to instill in you.

I never had any black friends growing up in suburban western Pennsylvania. My neighbors and everyone at school were as white as my family. We saw non-Caucasians from time to time, but for all I knew, most of the rest of the world was as white, culturally and racially, as I was. To my parents' substantial credit, they raised all four of us with a clear moral understanding that it was wrong to denigrate anyone based on the color of their skin. As much as it was possible in such a situation, we were raised to be color-blind.

So I've been a little disappointed by some of the e-mail I've been getting from my mother the last few years. A few years ago, she shared an outraged e-mail about how the U.S. Postal Service was honoring Islam with a set of Ramadan-themed stamps, even though Muslim had killed thousands of Americans on 9-11. When I would get these things, I would chalk it up to her infamiliarity with the Internet, debunk the claims of the e-mail, and remind her to check those things out on Snopes.com before forwarding them, and move on.

Then on Wednesday, I got an e-mail from her about Barack Obama and what a disaster he would be for the United States if he were elected president.

Now I'm an Obama supporter, it's true, but if someone wants to question his qualifications, that's fine. You can complain that he's too liberal, or that he lacks the requisite experience for the job, and while I might disagree, I won't begrudge you the right to say your piece. I probably won't even begrudge you the right to send such a critique to my e-mailbox, especially if you're a good friend or a close relative.

I draw the line at racist crap, though, and my mom (I'm sad to say) crossed that line. The e-mail was a collection of quotes allegedly culled from "The Audacity of Hope" and "Dreams of My Father." As near as I can tell, the quotes are all accurate ... as long as your notion of acccuracy isn't affected by little details like changing the meaning of a quote by removing it from its defining context.

The basic thrust of the e-mail is this: Barack Obama hates white people, is sympathetic to al Qaeda and its goals. You'd have to be insane to vote for him.

Racism is an ugly little snake. It feeds on ignorance and fear, and uses them both to stoke the fires of its own hatred a little bit higher and a little bit hotter. My mom's no dummy, but for some reason she's willing to shut off her filters when someone she trusts forwards this crap to her, and then she allows the hateful little people who spawn this e-mail to use her to spread their hate further.

She knows better than this. Why does she do this?

The really sad thing is, I called her up on Saturday to talk with her about it. I had just spoken to my oldest brother. He was so repulsed by what she had shared that he actually had set up his e-mail account to reject anything from her address. I realized that I was letting something simmer and stew that I needed to address head-on.

So I explained to her why I found the e-mail objectionable: not because it attacked Barack Obama, but because it was racist and because it pandered to fear and hatred. I tried to explain what a reasoned criticism of a candidate would look like, and why this one completely failed to pass the muster.

I explained that it ran contrary to the values that she and dad had tried to pass on to us, and that we were passing on to our children, and I might as well have been talking to a wall.

She could not see what the problem was. To her, it was just a different, and important, perspective on the man who likely will be our next president. She could not understand why I thought it was racist, or why Brian found it so objectionable. As far as she could see, she was the wronged party in this whole affair, because we weren't listening to what she had to say.

It was sad to see, and more than a little painful. My mom raised us to be tolerant and respectful, and now, for whatever reason, it looks like she's forgetting in her age the lessons she taught us so well in youth.