Elevating Our Guilt Rather Than Our Triumphs

Most of you who actually read some of the posts I write probably think that all I do is pick on President Obama. The problem is that there is such a fertile field here, that every time I look it’s another stupid or rather insensitive thing he does.

Since AOL purchased the leftist Huffington Post (for an outlandish price), I get daily news items on my computer which I would not normally read on purpose. Today they featured an article showing our President and his wife hanging a rather controversial Norman Rockwell painting, illustrating a dark period in our history, in the West Wing adjacent to the Oval Office. It shows a little black girl being escorted to her elementary school in the South accompanied by federal marshals with graffiti splattered on a wall showing the word “nigger”. The painting was made in 1963 and is titled “A Problem We Have to Live With”. It apparently was on the cover of Time Magazine in the 60’s during the civil rights integration crisis.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/22/ruby-bridges-visits-the-w_n_904710.html

Maybe the Huffington Post and Mr. Obama should instead recognize the multi-million dollar memorial to Martin Luther King soon to be unveiled in our Nation’s capital which celebrates our triumph over bigotry and shows how far we have come on the race issue. Mr. Obama and his wife have certainly benefited from the affirmative action we have implemented over the last 50 years which allowed them to go to schools “unescorted” or be admitted to Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard even though their grades may not have warranted it.

If we think that the White House should be a place to hang pictures about some dark periods in our history why don’t we hang paintings of dead bodies lying in the battlefields of the Civil War, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or perhaps a painting of our current unemployment lines, or conditions in the ghettos of some of our major cities where drugs and all sorts of crime occur every day and call that a “Problem We Have to Live With”.

This event got me thinking and just hit me the wrong way, I really feel for that little black girl in the painting, but like the exceptional country we are, we acted to address and rectify this injustice. So, if you think I sound like a racist, well you’re entitled to your opinion, but I think Obama’s decision to hang that picture in the White House was insulting and racist to the American people. If you disagree, I’d like to hear your perspective.