Sins of the past can't always determine the future.

I write this blog on Sunday October 5th 2008. In a month voters across America will head to the polls and elect either Senator John McCain or Senator Barrack Obama our next president. Which ever man wins this election will inherit an abysmal economy from one George Walker Bush and a nation currently fight two wars. 

           The are many Americans who've stated publicly that they can't vote for Senator Obama simply because he's black (his father was black & his mother white) which leaves us to ask the question: how far has America truly come when it comes to acknowledging many of the racist facts of our history.

           Are we the same nation which stole land from it's natives by giving them blankets tainted with small pox and then later forced many to go on a death march from Florida to a reservation that later became the state of Oklahoma in the midst of a harsh winter which they named the "Trail of tears?" 

          Are we the same nation who openly traded with European countries for African slaves and passed laws insuring that they would be treated as perpetual second class subhuman citizens?

          Are we the same nation that allowed wealthy men to lure hundreds of thousands of Chinese here with the promise of mountains filled with gold (the great "Kim son")so that they would work for pennies to build our railroads only to pass the Chinese Exclusion act and to allow cities like San Francisco to pass anti Chinese laws by the dozen?

         Are we the same nation that took the Philippines from Spain and then condescendingly told the Filipino people that they weren't intelligent enough for self rule prior to engaging them in one of the bloodiest guerrilla wars in our history?

         Are we the same nation that allows men to pay immigrants pittances and then allowed cities like New York and Boston to put up signs which read "Irish need not apply" or "We don't hire Italians?"

        Are we the same nation that deported American born citizens with Spanish surnames in Arizona, Texas, California and New Mexico for organizing labor unions?

       Are we the same nation who confiscated the property of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese dissent and imprisoned them as threats to national security during the second world war?

        The truth is we are all these things, but we are also the nation that produced men like Ben Franklyn who started the first society for the abolition of slavery. We are the same nation where an immigrant named Andrew Carnegie offered to buy the nation of the Philippines from the  United States that he would GIVE to the Filipino people. We are the same nation that passed legislation in 1920 that allowed women to vote and passed civil rights legislation in the mid and late 1960s to give every American something to which we should all be entitled, an opportunity. 

        Our glorious republic is many things, but we are far from perfect. If Barrack Obama IS elected president, many self appointed "leaders" within minority communities will stand in utter silence. They can't argue that minorities can only aspire to so much because the majority of Americans would have asserted that it simply isn't true. Will it occur? Will we ever become the color blind society of which Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed and spoke to the world of so eloquently?  We don't know.

         Does Obama NOT being elected mean that we are still a nation with deeply rooted racial issues that will never be resolved in our life spans? Not necessarily. One American in five when asked said they couldn't vote for a black man. I'll wager 20 years ago that number was MUCH higher. We as a nation while we need to acknowledge that there are differences between us be they ethnic, religious or ideological and simply work together for the group of the nation as a whole despite them.

        We as a nation should own up to our past, both the shining moments and utter disgraces and then move forward. We shouldn't stew in the anger of past injustice, but at the same time we mustn't ignore them as if they never occurred. We are a great nation with the potential tp accomplish nearly anything. After all, we're all Americans.