Obama, I'm with you · Posted Apr 30, 05:07 PM by Todd Babiak
I have a lot of sympathy for Senator Barack Obama this week, as the potential Democratic nominee for the President of the United States struggles with the words and deeds of his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright. To Senator Obama, Reverend Wright is a spiritual guide, a mentor, practically a member of the family.
It’s difficult to know what to do when these people lose their nut.
Several members of my extended family have gone crazy in the last twenty years. Maybe they bought me lunch a couple or times, at Boston Pizza, or a cheap birthday present I really didn’t want. Maybe they included me in their nighttime prayers, which is the sort of thing that breaks my heart to consider.
Unlike Reverend Wright, no one in my family — that I know of — believes the American government helped engineer the AIDS virus to wipe out black people. However, my aunt did once claim that God — busy as He is — sent a tame squirrel to our family cabin to make everyone happy.
Then there are the “friends of the family,” like Lou and Annabel, the drug addicts who lived in my parents’ basement for several months in the year 2000. They weren’t into hard drugs — just marijuana, non-injury-related back pills, and a lot of hard liquor stolen from my parents’ storage room. But what they lacked in criminality they made up for in anger. And cigarettes. And worryingly large fingers.
Yet it was difficult to turn my back on them and throw their stuff out of my parents’ house. They had been a part of the family. Not a nice part, or an interesting part. Not a part I wanted, or asked for.
But a part.
I live in a different world from Senator Obama. His problem people coin lovely and resonant phrases like “the audacity of hope.” Mine get drunk and threaten to burn me in my sleep.
Of course, I am not running for office. So it doesn’t matter that Lou and Annabel were violent and racist toward First Nations peoples and didn’t shower as often as polite society expects. The point is, Senator Obama, I know how difficult it can be to drive to Leduc at the end of the month, load Lou and Annabel’s smelly belongings into the back of my brother’s truck, and dump it all at a depressing rental unit by the railroad tracks, only to have Lou come after me, shirtless, with an ashtray in one hand and a broken light bulb in the other.
I got through it, Senator Obama, and I know you will, too.
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Oh the good ole days, how I miss them. CT, I bet Obama knows all about the circle of death too. Just check out the Empire Strikes Barack video and feel his pain.
— CB May 6, 06:39 PM #
I remember too well the good times.
IT’S MOVING DAY LOU, MOVING DAY!!!!!!!!!
— Kirk Jun 6, 10:09 AM #