{"id":175,"date":"2009-01-20T09:06:38","date_gmt":"2009-01-20T15:06:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dustykennedy.com\/?p=175"},"modified":"2009-01-20T13:13:44","modified_gmt":"2009-01-20T19:13:44","slug":"dear-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dustykennedy.com\/dear-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Dear America,"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"barack-obama-and-progress1\"My fellow Americans, why such the fervor today?\u00a0 As we stand at this historic(?) precipice, I ask you to consider this:\u00a0 Why is today so historic?\u00a0 I understand that Mr. Obama is about to become the first black President.\u00a0 I get that.\u00a0 But why is it cause for a 4-day, $170 million shindig in the middle of the economic times we are experiencing?\u00a0 It boils down to this:\u00a0 he hasn’t done anything yet.\u00a0 So why are we celebrating?\u00a0 Let me put this in perspecitve that I’m sure a lot of you can relate to.<\/p>\n

Let’s say that a company has been around for 200 years.\u00a0 It’s a very powerful company that controls the fate of a lot of businesses.\u00a0 Let’s say it’s a financial institution.\u00a0 The CEO of that company has always been an old white man.\u00a0 Well, times are bad and sales have not been good.\u00a0 The CEO has announced that he is leaving the company because some of the decisions he made were bad decisions.\u00a0 The board of directors has elected a young, vibrant black man to be his successor.\u00a0 A couple of months later, when the “change” is set to occur, the new CEO’s staff has decided to throw a huge party that the company can’t really afford.\u00a0 Everyone is excited that change has occurred and that the new CEO is going to be the savior of the company.\u00a0 All is right in the world.<\/p>\n

My question is this:\u00a0 Why is the company celebrating?\u00a0 For all they know, the new CEO could come in and run the company into the ground.\u00a0 The only thing we can celebrate for sure is that it’s someone new in leadership.\u00a0 And that’s not really a celebration; it’s just change.\u00a0 Something different.\u00a0 Different doesn’t always equal better.<\/p>\n

I am not an Obama hater.\u00a0 I hope that he does right the ship we’re on.\u00a0 I pray for the man and his administration.\u00a0 And I think it is a great thing that we have moved past our history and elected a black man as president.\u00a0 But if that’s why we are celebrating, shouldn’t that have occurred November 5, 2008?\u00a0 People will try to equate this to Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech.\u00a0 I think that is giving Mr. Obama a little more than he deserves.\u00a0 I still think we have a little ways to go before Dr. King’s speech comes to fruition.\u00a0 And I think we can get there.\u00a0 Mr. Obama may play an important role in ushering it in quicker…but we don’t know yet.\u00a0 I will ask everyone this, please go easy on the man.\u00a0 That includes not building him up so much that no human could possibly live up to the expectations.<\/p>\n

All I’m saying is give it 4 years and let’s see where we are.\u00a0 If we are better off, I’ll jump on the band wagon and say, “Job well done, Mr. President.”\u00a0 Until then, let’s all learn to be patient and not jump at the first sign of change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My fellow Americans, why such the fervor today?\u00a0 As we stand at this historic(?) precipice, I ask you to consider this:\u00a0 Why is today so historic?\u00a0 I understand that Mr. Obama is about to become the first black President.\u00a0 I get that.\u00a0 But why is it cause for a 4-day,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[20],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dustykennedy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dustykennedy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dustykennedy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dustykennedy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dustykennedy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.dustykennedy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177,"href":"https:\/\/www.dustykennedy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions\/177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dustykennedy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dustykennedy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dustykennedy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}