Waiting for the Worst

This came to me via a chain of links I can't reconstruct, and the blog itself is new to me. But it deserves attention. It sums up one of my greatest fears for an Obama presidency.

. . . once Obama started talking, after about fifteen seconds, my wife suddenly flipped over towards the wall, covering her head and saying through the muffled blankets...

“I can't watch!”

And in that moment, she verbalized exactly what was on my mind, and I dare say what was on the minds of a considerable majority of the African Americans watching him call down verbal thunder in those minutes.

We...were afraid.

I found myself not unconsciously scanning the roaring crowd, praying to not see a weapon pop above the throng and point at him. I couldn't stop myself. When the camera lingered on him too long during stretches of the speech, I averted my eyes for a few seconds, fearful that I might catch a tragic moment playing out in horrific real-time. I'd look back again a second or two later.

I found I couldn't really absorb or analyze the speech as I'd have liked. I was too busy checking out cameras in the crowd held aloft, and wondering about security. “Jesus, he gets so many people at his events! How the fuck is he gonna secure the venues? Ohhhhh man...”

I picked up on this when announced his candidacy, and I'm your average middle class white guy. I don't normally jump to those sorts of conclusions. The threat might be real and might be imagined, but we still live in that United States, the one where there're many plausible ways that one of our own could decide we just can't have a black president.