Barack Obama is the President
We’ve talked a lot here about Obama’s reluctance to openly discuss drug policy. We’ve been disappointed if not surprised that our domination of his Change.gov website failed to provoke an intelligent response. As activists, that’s just what we do and we won’t stop anytime soon.
But we’d be foolish to let our frustration obscure the magnitude of what just happened. The American people just put a person of color in the White House. How many of you thought you’d see this in your lifetime? I didn’t. It’s so incredible to me, I still struggle to process it as the reality of all this periodically penetrates my entrenched political cynicism and I summon for a moment a hope-like sensation that must be what everyone’s been talking about.
It’s not about Obama or his policies, it’s about the American people. It shows that we’re capable of transcending centuries of prejudice and idiocy, provided that circumstances are properly aligned. It’s purely symbolic, of course, but powerfully so.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I thought we’d end the drug war long before electing an African-American president. I’m amazed to learn that legalizing drugs is actually the more difficult undertaking. But so be it. To anyone who says overcoming drug prohibition is just an impossible fantasy, I say "Barack Obama is the president."
But we’d be foolish to let our frustration obscure the magnitude of what just happened. The American people just put a person of color in the White House. How many of you thought you’d see this in your lifetime? I didn’t. It’s so incredible to me, I still struggle to process it as the reality of all this periodically penetrates my entrenched political cynicism and I summon for a moment a hope-like sensation that must be what everyone’s been talking about.
It’s not about Obama or his policies, it’s about the American people. It shows that we’re capable of transcending centuries of prejudice and idiocy, provided that circumstances are properly aligned. It’s purely symbolic, of course, but powerfully so.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I thought we’d end the drug war long before electing an African-American president. I’m amazed to learn that legalizing drugs is actually the more difficult undertaking. But so be it. To anyone who says overcoming drug prohibition is just an impossible fantasy, I say "Barack Obama is the president."
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