Listening to Julian Bream and John Williams playing ... er ... guitars.
... Cynic Mode Off
We should not go colour-blindly into this presidency - we should shout about it as loud as we can manage - within the lifetime of the new president black people were segregated and not granted the same human rights as white people. This day at least is permitted some positive discrimination. With all that is going on in the world there is plenty of time for a critical evaluation of Obama's performance in the face of the challenges to come. For MLK, Rosa Parks, for everyone.
... Cynic Mode On
I wasn't actually as excited by this until yesterday but the thinly-veiled racism put out under cover of the standard "I don't notice people's colour me" banner has got me worked up a bit. I shouldn't let it bother me because as you are probably aware - being a well-informed and well balanced individual who exists in the fuzzy area between scepticism and cynicism - most of the people shouting on the Interwebs have not got a clue about :- a. How the world works and b. How many people there actually are in the world from which every shade of opinion can be extracted. On the subject of understanding how the world works I am especially hopeful after Obama's statements about putting science back where it belongs. We do indeed need to put aside childish things - we need to think hard about solutions - we need to write essays that analyse the world to give us a rich picture of the state of things rather than the multiple choice solutions that have been offered to us with a view to making everything easy. We do not have to read anything because the punditry serves up a few black-and-white answers from which we take our best-fit pick. We have not had to think in recent years because that has been the job of someone else.
[Non-Sequitur removed for clarity and because my mind has run away with itself in the face of all the optimism]
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