The President Is In Dallas

It's November.  Soon it will be November 22.

Fifty years since the killing of President Kennedy in Dallas.

And at this time of a heart-breaking anniversary and in the midst of the blinding rage of racism that is bedeviling our nation, another young president has gone to this city of infamy.  President Obama was in Dallas today to speak about the benefits of the Health Care Act.

I cannot imagine what is in the minds of the White House schedulers.

Are they ignorant of history?

Have they never heard of "copycat crimes"?

Are they arrogantly insensitive to our sensitivities?

Or is this some sort of macho gesture?

I'll be glad when President Obama's out of Dallas.  Call it superstition, but Dallas is a bad place.  Texas' hatred is being stoked by Reckless Rick Perry, a governor who talks about killing officials he doesn't agree with and talks of secession.

These are perilous times, with many whites feeling threatened by the shift of power in this country away from them and into the hands of people of color, people they have mistreated for three hundred years.  Like most oppressors they fear retaliation by their victims.

But that's not what's going to happen.  The blacks of South Africa did not engage in mass retaliation against the whites after apartheid was done.  The Irish Catholic majority of Ireland did not rise up in massive slaughter of the Protestant minority after the English pulled out their protective forces.  And in all of America's wars, the blacks, and Latinos, and Asian Americans, and Native Americans took up arms against America's enemies even though America was then a nation run by and for the benefit of whites only.

The only conclusion I can reach is that some people are better than others in the sense that they are more forgiving.  Or smart enough to know what whites in this country have been slow to learn, that diversity is good, that power shared is power increased, and that we all do better when we are in it together.

Still, I'll be very glad when President Obama is safely back in the White House and not in Texas or other places of guns and hatred.