Dear American Killing Machine,
Please leave Barrack Obama alone.
There has been no candidate as promising for the American presidency since Robert Kennedy - murdered in 1968 on the eve of winning the Democratic nomination. I trembled when Hillary Clinton announced that she will, like RFK, campaign into June, and feared for Obama, especially if he lets her join as VP candidate and thus his successor; I promptly imagined all AKM’s rifling through your arsenal. With Clinton’s surrender I see your people hogging the lanes ahead to ambush him at one of the perilous defiles.

Robert Kennedy was shot two months after ML King Jr. who, moved in 1963 by President John Kennedy’s open-mindedness, had roused the nation with his dream “… that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”
King, like JFK, Robert and other dreamers of the 60’s who longed for a kinder, gentler America would be apprehensively pleased that that dream is nearing reality today.
But only if you, dear AKM’s, give it a chance!
Your nation’s Constitution was crafted “to … establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” It allows you to acquire arms that do immeasurable harm, often impulsively. So restrain yourselves for your Constitution’s sake; forego the fleeting rewards of killing contracts; keep America a land of promise, not shame and hurt. No democracy has wasted more talent, especially political talent, than America. You find white leadership beguiling and you glorify whiteness, a sad legacy of discredited 19th century concepts of race unworthy of the great power America is today. American xenophobia reaches its zenith when non-whites show talents that outdo whites in any position, whether in business, the professions or government. Your history is full of such people. Obama is one of them. And who should decide what is best for America? Surely not Oswald or Ruby or Sirhan or Booth, or conspirators or you, agents of a cowardly cause!
America must heal from the wounds of the past ten years. Don’t you bleed when manipulation of word and distortion of deed make wrongs look right, when wealth is seized by influential bullies lacking moral or ethical strength and wresting others’ rights? Are you the garrulous media that thrive on drivel and find depth, analysis and contemplation boring? And does not the whip of your foxy bosses hurt your naked back? Removing Obama will retard US and world affairs immeasurably. Remember how FDR’s presidential campaign in 1932 invigorated the nation battered by the great depression and his New Deal brought benefits to farmers, workers and the jobless, though angering short-sighted businessmen? He escaped assassination in 1933 and the world later thanked him for helping to win WWII, when even greedy business took his side.
Obama is quintessentially new American, a mix of new and old, black and white, raised at home, Indonesia, Hawaii and mainland USA, giving him an international background sadly lacking in Americans, acknowledged strangers to geography. It is even said that US leaders fight wars to learn geography! This ignorance bespeaks a nation in distress, despite wealth, strength, resources and enterprise. But today greedy corporatists who see American power as the way to seize the world have highjacked it and will pay you AKM’s handsomely to silence those asking for moderation, fairness and sharing – all Christian virtues.
But would you sacrifice Christ himself today even as your ancestors did two millennia ago?
I close with a final plea. Our small world hurtles through space in an immense universe; how lucky we are who share this fabulous journey! Our ship provides us with all that’s needed for survival and prosperity so long as we treat it with care. Do a few of us really need to own everything it offers when our time as passengers is so insignificant in the immensity of time? So reject the power brokers who use you. Tell them, once and for all, the country is above the individual; tell them to go to hell and leave Obama to help those as yet unable to join the ride or deprived of the freedom to choose a seat on this wondrous journey. Let Obama take his rightful place, come November, unthreatened and whole, as the nation wills it by its votes. That’s democracy!
As former President Reagan (himself wounded by you) said, in his campaign: “Let’s make America great again”

The kids are old enough now to make their own decisions and this spring they took a rest from soccer. It was the first break in a decade and I’ve regretted not stepping in and casting the veto vote - each time I’ve negotiated through streets packed with parking outside soccer fields, watching with nostalgia the phalanx of folding chairs on which sit parents ensconced in blankets, or trembling under umbrellas, or angrily swatting mosquitoes. There have been the moments when I’ve heard the roar of approval from the bleachers as the ball found the net, and looked up to see victorious high-fiving dads on one side of the field;

on the other, dads from the teams receiving the goal in the back of the nets are hanging their heads and distancing themselves from the losing team. I’ve been on both sides of the field in the last decade; next year I’m casting the veto vote and joining the outpouring of parents trundling across wet fields under overcast skies to cheer my sons on to rarified soccer heights and massive hauls of medals.
Fact is, it was the medal haul at the end of the season that contributed partly to me not stepping in to veto their decision to not play soccer this year. I gave serious thought to the physical activity that would not happen with this decision – me having to descend to the basement and retrieve five folding director’s chairs with the cupholders on the arms, one for for warm drinks in wet-snow weather, the other to hold the can of insect repellant to deter the squadrons of determined, propellor-driven mosquitoes. I also gave intense thought to the loss of the running around loaded with the weight of bags filled with winter coats, water bottles, soccer equipment and the first aid kit filled with ice packs, band aids and soothing creams for mosquito bites. Too, I thought about the dog-fights for parking spots closest to the entrance of soccer fields, the stress of negotiating the back-and-forth parallel parking while an impatient line of cars form behind me as I painfully rock into the constricted spot left between a Smart Car and a Ford F750.
It was the mass of medals that bothered me. Take a walk into any of the kids’ rooms and you would be greeted by a selected wall on which hangs groups of medals as on a tree prolific with fruit. This is no boast that the kids are overachievers or overall success stories in sports such as soccer, basketball and karate. It’s pretty much the age we live in – everyone is a winner. In the end, everyone gets a huge medal whether they excelled or not.
Well-known and feared for my cynicism, I am held in check with spousal control whenever I go to a concert, or attend a tournament, or whatever the event the kids participate in, whether at school or in the wider world of organised sports.
“Man, hush your mouth,” would be the reproach when I begin grumbling at an official addressing the audience and unaware of the existence of singular and plural verbs. The spousal whisper would be direct and dire with a threat, the sharp heel of a shoe hovering warningly above my foot: “You not going to stand up and correct the lady’s grammar and shame me, yuh hear!”
Group efforts depress me for the mix of mediocrity with talent, the surge of the middle-of-the-road, bell-curved players drowning the few instrumentalists who could uplift the emotions. I fidget in audiences when I have to do my duty at these functions, when I have to wave to my sons lost in a sea of brass instruments, the band’s efforts described in ascending hyperbole by music directors who surreptitiously urge the audience, my good self among them, to rise in ovation.
Father, put a hand! What this place coming to, I wonder, when I am reluctantly lifted to my feet with a killer, wifely stare. Of course, I don’t applaud. And I make it a point, despite the reproach all the way to the car in the parking lot, to ask the attendant at the exit door for my medal as a participant in the audience.
It wasn’t this way when I was growing up in Trinidad. My experience in primary and high school, for example, was such that we busted our brains with cramming for examinations that determined whether we succeeded in life or drowned among the unwashed human derelicts on a sidewalk on Frederick Street in Port-of-Spain. As simple at that. To win a medal then took not only hard work, it also mean working at the books non-stop – school during the day, evening classes afterwards, and Saturday mornings for extra lessons. Winning a medal in my day was a weighty thing – neighbours came to visit, to share and dream about similar success for their children.
Sometimes I think we’ve lost our way, that the value has gone out of things we should hold dear.

Guyana >