where's FrenchieCat?

[Hekate]

62. I feel your pain

I came late to the Obama party, having first supported Edwards, then Hillary. I live in California, where despite our enormous population our primary election doesn't count for shit because the presidential nominee is pretty much settled by the time we get to vote.

However by that time I had read Obama's first book, and I liked his bio and the way he thinks. Everybody has a bias and I have been clear about mine: You Mainlanders have no idea how Hawai'ian this man is, and what a different culture that denotes. I'm half a generation older than he is, but I was raised on Oahu, went to public schools, and like his parents, graduated from the University of Hawai'i. The aloha his grandparents had for Hawai'i, despite their personal struggles, having come from someplace so different, resonates with my own parents' reaction and the aloha they felt. The slight sense being an outsider to the majority culture, of being always seen as a newcomer, somewhat paralleled mine, as neither of us looks in the slightest like a Polynesian or Asian, and after awhile it wears on you.

What I got from DU was that so many people felt cognitive dissonance. They thought they saw a black man acting white, but what they were seeing was a hapa-haole Islander who could have chosen to stay and marry a local girl and join the melting pot. But he didn't. He chose a different identity, and I do mean he chose.

I go from that bio, and it does not mean I "worship" Barack Obama. It does mean I feel affinity. That affinity includes my bias toward intellectuals who don't talk down to the public.

Gotta go -- my timer just went off...