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He embodies the future of America, the best we have to offer. As barriers fall, more and more families are mixed race. I'm white and my wife is Cuban, so our two sons are Cuban-American. This is not a big deal in NYC where we live, but it would have been unthinkable where I grew up in upstate NY in the Seventies. Friends of ours that are a mixed race family had to move to North Carolina for a few years to be with an ailing parent. They said that they did not face a lot of overt hostility, but they had no close friends. They were politely shunned.
Reactionary forces will fight like crazy against the forward progress of humanity, but they won't be able to stop it. America will become a mature country in terms of race relations when it is not only ready to elect a member of a minority as President, but also when it is ready to elect a mixed race person.
Obama's speech was one of the most memorable I have ever seen. What's best about him is not his background or race, but his ability to appeal to the best in all of us. He offers us a hopeful, humane future--bush/cheney only have fear and hate to offer.
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