The power of blogging

I came home from work yesterday to find an email from the BBC. They'd seen my blog and wanted to know if they could talk to me on their World Have Your Say "conversation show" (I guess that's "talk radio" in Brit-speak). The email had arrived at 8:30, and the show was on at noon my time, so of course I missed it. But wow! How else would I have even been contacted if I didn't blog?

Anyway, the topic was "whether the fact that Obama won the US election means we live in a more equal world", according to the email. On the website they unfortunately changed it to the more succinct, but rather silly, "Has Obama created a more equal world?”.

My response: The election indicates that we have at least moved beyond the Bradley effect, where a highly qualified candidate found that people "just couldn't bring themselves to vote for a black man". We did see that a majority of American voters could bring themselves to cast a vote for Obama despite his darker skin. But note that the election was still cast in terms of race. And as the soldier in Doonesbury said "he's half white, you know". And he was raised in a white family. In Hawaii, which does not seem to me as if it would be a center of Black culture (but I may be wrong on this - unfortunately not that familiar with "real" Hawaii.) Given the mess we are in after 8 years of Bush, with the opposition a 72-year-old cancer patient who makes reckless choices such as... no, I'm not even going to go there again. Anyway, I would have expected the popular-vote to be the landslide the electoral vote was, instead of less than 7%.

So yeah, we're further along than we were in 1970 in terms of race. And having an African-American family in the White House is GREAT! But I think we can all agree that Obama is an EXCEPTIONAL man. And in 1960 the big news was that another EXCEPTIONAL man had been elected despite the fact that he was a Catholic. Have there been any Catholic presidents since Kennedy? We have never elected a President who was not Christian. Or who was female. Or Asian. Or homosexual (at least as far as we know). And in day-to-day life, women get paid less, more blacks go to jail, most homosexuals cannot get married. There are plenty of inequalities to go around.

All that being said, I am "cautiously optimistic". I do think we are moving in the right direction in terms of tolerance, at least, for a variety of differences.

Enough being serious. I hope the Obama girls enjoy their puppy. I hear it will be a shelter dog, which is really cool. I saw a post where someone suggested they should get an Alaskan Malamute bitch. That made me laugh.

And this morning I was walking in the snow. Not sticking to the roads, and will soon change to rain, I'm sure, but for now - it's snowing. Bravo went racing around like a nut-case more often than usual as a result.

Have a great day, everyone!