A Middle Name More Shocking Than Mine...

Today is an important part of history and as many have put it, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream was realized as Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th president. But as my uncle points out, MLK's dream was that "they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the contact of their character" and today's emphasis was most definitely on color. And I would like to point out that after listening to a 7th grade African American boy say that NOW he can be president, I was happy for him, but sad to realize that I still cannot be president because I am a woman. Of course, if you know me, you will understand the sarcasm of that sentence given the fact that we have never had a woman president and that would never stop me from thinking I could do it. But apparently that restriction applies to others?

What I did not like from the commentary today was that one of the election commentators suggested that by having Obama as president, African American children might forget how much their ancestors struggled in recent history for equality. While history is important to remember so that we do not repeat our past mistakes, with the emphasis on the inequality and injustices of our past, in a way it gives our children reason to believe that all people are not created equal. If we go back throughout history we will find all different races and genders abhorrently oppressed at some point in time. A Hebrew law once stated that if a woman was married or engaged and was subsequently raped, she MUST be put to death. I have about 5000 years worth of material regarding the unfair treatment of women if inequality and lack of opportunity are really the topics. But, there's truly no point in living in the past without a current threat to our way of life, so I suggest let's live in the present.

And the present is that today is a monumental and historical day. It is sometimes shocking to believe that when my mother was in high school and went down to visit a friend in Tennessee, she personally experienced that African Americans (although not called that or even blacks at the time) could not walk on the same side of the street, sit in the same part of the bus or drink from the same fountain as her. That was certainly not a long time ago and that should be recognized and valued today for what it means to us. In the future, today's events will lose some of that significance, but that will be a special day because that will be when we have realized MLK's dream. And I hope that for the women out there watching the Inauguration today, that even though "we" have either been forgotten or simply disregarded, that somehow, even without a woman ever having been president, that it is not outside the realm of possibilities for a girl to think she one day can be president. Because the world has come a long way in the last few thousand years and we don't to see a woman as president to believe in ourselves.

And now back to football...