Obama supporters and non-Obama people... can you all please come in.

[EdwardWilbur]

Let me tell you all a story.

My father was a big and stern man, very tall and sharp. He wasn’t what I would call a great father, he treated me and my sisters indifferently… at least that’s what I thought at the time. You see, he spent so much time working. He owned a manufacturing company back in the 60s. When I was younger, I always thought my father was quite uncaring, but I soon came to realize that it was just that he was unable to express his emotions. I hated my father for a long time…

Until, one day, as a young boy, I went to work with him. He took me to his factory and it amazed me what I saw. There were lots of black people working there. You see, my father was one of the first people in the neighborhood to employ blacks at the same wages the other companies gave for whites.
Back then, there was a lot of prejudices going around, especially to the black population. So, I always wondered why my father decided to give these people a job. I wondered why he treated them with such respect and kindness at a time where everybody in my school would talk about their parents worrying about this “negro problem”, where all I heard was racial epithets. But I grew to realize that my father, who may not have been perfect at home (there was a reason for that but I’d rather not go into that now), was a very principled man. He told me always to treat others with respect, regardless of color.

I didn’t know it then, but I soon began to realize that it was because of him that I didn’t have any racial connotations in my mind. Like, when people would stereotype, I would not be able to see it that way. My father always talked about equality, freedom and worth.

I say worth because he would always read to me about what former presidents would say. I remember this one passage from the declaration of independence;
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

I never realized how important that was in context of now until I read other things, such as the three-fifths compromise, where under the "Three-Fifths Compromise," slaves were counted as three-fifths of a human being for the purpose of determining a state's representation in Congress.
I thought of all those people, who were sicced upon, with firehoses and dogs. I thought about the Klan, I thought about everything that is wrong with this country... The biggest problem was, blacks in my neighborhood felt resigned to this fate.

Recently… as I have been watching this primary election, tears seem to fill my eyes everytime I see Mr. Obama, tears fill my eyes when I see his wins in predominantly white states.

Tears fill my eyes when I realize just how hard this man has worked to get here. He was born to an unlikely union… his father left when he was 2, and I suppose in that way, I respect him even more, because without my father I wouldn’t have been half the man that I am. He went through life without a father, with a loving mother who was poor. A mother who raised him on foodstamps while going to college. And I suppose he took care of her aswell, sort of looking out for each other.
He wasn’t born into wealth, he had to earn scholarships to every school he went to, he had to work his behind off to get into Harvard law with no money. He had to work his behind off to become president of the Harvard Law Review.

He wasn’t born with wealth, and he decided after his graduation from Harvard to help those people in Chicago who also needed help, working for $12,000 a year instead of making 6-7 figure salaries like all his other law colleagues.

He wasn’t born with connections, he had no former president on his side, he fought hard to get into the senate and became one of the 3 black senators we have. (We have 18 female senators just incase you’re wondering). He worked hard to bring solutions to tough problems in Chicago, including a sweeping ethics reform and bringing healthcare to the poor.

He doesn’t have the connections or the personal money that his opponents did, he doesn’t have the backdoor deals that his opponents have made over the years. He is alone, with children of his own now, working his behind off once again to make this America a better place.
So I am surprised when people say that Mr. Obama is all show, all style… because that’s the same thing they used to say about blacks in the 60s. It’s the same thing they use to say when blacks were allowed to serve as lawyers and doctors. It’s the same thing, unfortunately, that many of my friends who were employers used to, and still say…

So when he says “I wasn’t born into wealth, I needed a little hope”, “My daddy left me when I was 2, I needed a little hope”, I understand. When I see how far he has come by himself, I think of my father…
I understood why my father insisted on taking me to his company, I understood why my father raised me the way he did, I understood why my father disciplined me. I finally understood. So now that I have children of my own, I can see what it means to be there for somebody and raise them with respect and love, even though it may have been hard for my father to do so for me. My children were the first to bring my attention to this site, and to Mr Obama’s campaign.

I don’t have a lot of money, but I have just given my first donation of $200 to barackobama.com, because I understand what it means to have nothing but hope. I understand what it’s like not having wealth. I understand what it means to go against a campaign who has 50 million dollars of their own money, and thousands of connections. I understand what my father meant when he told me to judge a person based on their accomplishments, instead of on their color or clothes or “style”.
My father passed away 12 years ago… but I know if he was alive today, he would have a smile on his face and be proud of me.

By the way, this song makes me think about Mr Obama and how far we’ve come: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7Wt4XlXUrc