Just Because...

I was on the road today with my boss, traveling to a couple of meetings intended on enhancing collaborations on our company’s proposals to conduct R&D in to certain Structural Health Monitoring applications. My boss has himself a XM Radio subscription and we listen to a lot of talk radio whenever we are on such road trips and these inevitably lead to discussions between the two of us about geo-socio-economic politics. Since nearly 90% of talk radio in the U.S. is hosted by conservative talking heads, I get to hear a lot of the viewpoints that I don’t really subscribe to, on a variety of topics, ranging from abortion to healthcare, everything in between and beyond.

During one such discussion with my boss today, he mentioned that probably all the black people voted for Barack Obama in the recent presidential election and of course, I contended that is not possible. This point came up because he thought that the liberal, left-wing machinery is the main reason for the lack of improvement in the lives of the minorities, especially, blacks, as this left-wing is more in to providing welfare and other such initiatives, that it desists people from actually getting of their asses and change things about their lives, you catch my drift. Blacks, he surmised, probably voted Democratic usually. Neither of us could actually vouch for it, as 1) We did not grow up as minority in this country and 2) We cannot really understand or comprehend the feelings of growing black in America. He mentioned that the blacks must’ve had so much invested in the success of Obama (one of their own) that they would’ve voted for him en masse.

This is like saying, just because you are Muslim living in India, you must secretly be rooting for Pakistan, which is utterly ridiculous thing to even insinuate. You cannot question someone’s integrity and their love and commitment for their country, just because they are not in majority. Its like saying, only whites have claim to patriotism in the U.S. (Well, it depends on what kind of whites you ask this. Recently, there was a video of a woman crying – in regard to the healthcare reform tamasha that’s been going on – and saying, “She wants her America – the America she grew up in – back”. I do not know what she means by that! Perhaps, she wants the America where Republicans were liberal and Democrats of the South were pro-slavery. Perhaps, she wants her America where it was mainly only whites that ran the country, I don’t know. Daily Show had an interesting piece on this that was absolutely brilliant and infinitely hilarious!)

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Reform Madness - White Minority
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An interesting thing happened a week or so before the presidential election in October 2008.I was waiting at a bus stop to take the bus home and there were lots of election volunteers going around registering people to vote etc. There was a girl volunteer who approached a guy – who was black – and asked him whether he had registered to vote. He said yes, she probed further – she was from the local Democratic Party chapter – as to whether he has chosen a candidate. He said yes and she further wanted to know, if he didn’t mind, whom he was leaning towards. There was an interesting dynamic in action, right there. She didn’t assume right away that since he was black, he must be Pro-Obama and he wanted to see how far she would go. He duly said he is leaning Republican and McCain. They got in to a little chitchat about the pros and cons of the candidates (Pros of the candidate they were supporting, and Cons of the other candidate). I was standing about three feet away from them and watched the entire thing unfold. Soon my bus showed up and I had to leave, but before I boarded the bus, I inserted myself in to their conversation and indicated as a foreigner, how I felt about the candidates and moved on.

During our return trip, we listened to some more conservative radio and lo and behold, there were some callers on the show that were blacks who said they did not vote for Obama. For crying out loud, The RNC Chairman is black and I’m assuming he didn’t vote for Obama either.

Now, as to what my boss thought about NOT all blacks voting for Obama – Well, I did not want to do the whole, “I told you so!” routine. I know he heard those callers on the radio show and he shall come to his own realizations.