A Golden Opportunity

Here in the United States our new president is not so new anymore. The honeymoon is over, so to speak. Mr. Obama is struggling with real world issues that require real solutions rather than easily dispensed campaign trail promises and feel-good speeches. The rubber is on the road and he needs some serious traction control.

I’m not a huge fan of most of the policies and positions this president espouses; however, he is the duly elected president of my beloved country. It is in the best interest of the country – and therefore me – that he succeeds rather than fails in his job. Therefore, I sincerely hope he is successful, despite my own misgivings. It is in that spirit that I want to point out a missed opportunity to President Obama. Maybe he follows my blog. Do you think? Well, maybe it will get to him somehow. If you are reading this and know Barry, ping him on Facebook or something and clue him in.

I’m going to tread lightly on this subject because it touches on a topic that people get skittish about – race. Barack Obama is a black man. Well, at least he looks like a black man. That’s the gist of my discussion. Obama has physical characteristics shared by humans of African descent. He has dark colored skin, dark hair and dark eyes. He looks like a black man. Under the covers, however, he is genetically only half black. His mother is a white woman. Here’s where the golden opportunity comes in. To explain why I think it is so golden and such an opportunity, let me back up a little to my own upbringing.

I was born in a small town in upper eastern Tennessee. Nearly everyone in that town in the 1960s and 1970s was white. The only time I ever saw a black person they were on TV. Flip Wilson and Redd Foxx were my windows into that part of the world where black people lived. In short, I was ignorant. I stayed that way for a long time. Don’t get me wrong. My parents were good, loving people who taught me to avoid prejudice and treat everyone fairly. I was not raised by Klansmen or outright bigots. We all just suffered from a lack of education about people outside our cultural bubble. My guess is that many Americans suffer from this same lack even today.

It’s important to point out that ignorance is no respecter of persons. In other words, it works both ways. Anyone who has seen the excellent film “Crash” has been enlightened to the fact that bigotry and prejudice know no color. Humans bearing any combination of melanin, hair color, hair type, eye color, eye shape and any other racially influenced physical attribute are susceptible to racism – both as a victim AND as a perpetrator. It all stems from familiarity and the fear that flows from the lack of familiarity. If I perceive you to be like me, then I am less threatened by you and more likely to accept you and your viewpoints. That’s just human nature when it is allowed to roam freely without knowledge and truth.

This phenomenon was exceedingly apparent in the 2008 presidential election in the United States. According to data reported by The Guardian newspaper, 95% of black voters voted for Barack Obama. Only 43% of white voters did. While I am sure there are some legitimate political reasons for part of this data, it appears obvious that some people voted either for or against Mr. Obama based on the color of his skin. I am of the opinion that the Democratic Party and the vast majority of the American media really did the country a disservice by magnifying the race issue in this election. What they should have been doing is pointing out that a candidate of mixed ethnicity like Mr. Obama could unite the two major racial groups in the United States by bringing a unique perspective to the whole topic of race relations. Obama’s mother is white. His father is black. He grew up having to deal with whatever consequences his genealogy carried with it. Things are somewhat better nowadays, but when I was a kid, being a mixed race child would have definitely been a disadvantage from a social standpoint.

Barack Obama could have taken “The Dream” of Martin Luther King and carried it to Dr. King’s ultimate goal – a world where people of all colors could live and work side by side without even thinking about skin color. He could have magnified his overall humanity while downplaying his physical appearance as a black man. Humanity is more important than race. Unity is more important than separatism. Red, white and blue are more important colors than brown, tan and pink (or whatever color Caucasian skin is.) It was a golden opportunity. It could have truly united this country. As I said before, I am no fan of President Obama’s ideals. That’s just a difference of opinion. However, if he was going to become president, it would have been great to get a side benefit of racial harmony in the bargain.

You blew it Mr. President. It’s not too late, though. There’s still time to leverage your racial heritage in a positive way for this country. I hope you somehow eventually stumble upon this little essay and decide to do just that.

Multi-Purpose

My wife was recently in the hospital for a whole week. This post is not about why she ended up there. That’s a whole other story that I will likely share here at some point, but it’s long, drawn out and a little too recent for me to find any humor in it so I’m just going to write about something else. Well – it’s kind of related, but not really. Here goes…

The hospital Ellen was imprisoned in has a cafeteria downstairs just around the corner from the Emergency Room. I found that juxtaposition a little troubling, but during a whole week of eating three meals a day there I didn’t have to bolt to the adjacent wing at any time. So maybe it’s just a coincidence that the two facilities were so close together. Or maybe it was just forethought on the part of a hospital architect who had been victimized by bad cafeteria food. Either way it was inconsequential. The food was tolerable and not overpriced.

All over the hospital (including the cafeteria area) there were little hand sanitizer dispensers. They had signs on them that said something about a germ-free hospital and how these little dispensers would help insure that condition. That gave me a bit of a pause. “Germ-free” hospital…” OK, that’s interesting. There are a whole lot of sick people in the hospital. And we know, thanks to advances in science, that illness can be caused by germs and not a small dwarf living inside your stomach as once posited by the SNL character Theodoric of York – Medieval Barber. To get to the condition of a germ-free hospital you would need to kick all of those sick people out onto the sidewalk. Get outta here you bunch of germ infested vermin! Injured people only from here on out. Broken leg? C’mon in! Fractured skull? Pull up a gurney! Meningitis? Sorry, you and your germs need to find some place else to foul up with your microbial infestation.

Sorry. I got on a tangent there for a moment. Back to the cafeteria. In their never ending quest for a germ-free environment, the hospital installed utensil dispensers for plastic forks, spoons and knives. I have to admit these are pretty nifty. You pull a lever and a single utensil pops out for you to take. No grubbing around in open bins of forks and spoons with your (that’s right) germy mitts. You only touch the utensils you are personally going to use. Cool.

These dispensers were grouped up into three units installed side by side on top of a wire shelf. There was one unit for each of the three common cafeteria implements. Each unit was clearly labeled with what it contained. This is where I became the most amused by the whole utensil dispensing arrangement. I was so amused I took a picture of the dispensers. See?



Now, hopefully you are immediately seeing the amusement factor in all of this. The dispensers are labeled “forks”, “knives” and “multi-purpose spoons”. Apparently, forks and knives have one and only one purpose for their existence. Spoons? Now that’s a different story. You can do all kinds of stuff with spoons! Why, the possibilities are endless! Forks are for stabbing food. Knives are for cutting food. That seems pretty cut and dried, right? Hey! Maybe these utensil dispenser engineers have stumbled onto something. I decided to try to think of all the things I could do with a spoon. Here’s what I came up with (so far!)

1. Eating (OK – That one is obvious, but it’s so far-reaching! Think of all of the things you can eat with a spoon!)
2. Drinking very small portions of a beverage
3. Taking medicine (Now the hospital connection is becoming clear to me!)
4. Stirring stuff
5. Measuring recipe ingredients
6. Covering one eye for a vision test
7. Breathing on it and making it stick to the end of your nose to amuse a small child
8. Launching peas (You can do this with a fork, but it’s way more dangerous.)
9. Playing rhythm on your knees (You need two for this.)
10. Smearing cake icing (You can use a knife for this, but a big spoon works better.)
11. Gazing at your distorted reflection
12. Collecting (The decorative kind of course)
13. Tunneling out of prison
14. Making snowshoes for squirrels or other small animals
15. Hiding very small packages
16. Scraping out a jack-o-lantern


Quite a list, huh? And I’ve only just begun. Spoons are awesome! Spoons – the tool of the future! There’s no end to the utility of the ingenious, multi-purpose spoon! It will never be equaled in the annals of utensil history. Nothing will surpass its usefulness.

Except maybe…the SPORK!!!