Isn’t it amazing
The Obama Campaign & Movement 
A World Apart
Posted 9/20/2007 2:15 PM
Fifty years ago today my universe was beginning to open at the speed of sound. I had survived the seldom easy transition from childhood to the first step on the stairs to adulthood. I had made it to the 8th grade. And I was virtually dizzy with the array of outward bound paths that had suddenly surrounded me. And everyone had a “yellow brick road” quality. Where would this one lead? What about this one; or this one? Who cared about that. The excitement was caused by the fact that they all pointed toward a way out.

Not that I had anything to run from…except for the ties that bind. Heck, even that lucky son-of-a-gun, Ricky Nelson was beginning to exhibit a wanderlous quality. And, he had it all. The looks, the girls, the big brother, two adoring (although admittedly over-bearing) parents. If Ricky could peek at the horizon, then, by golly, so could I.

I attended “neighborhood school”; I had always attended such schools as did all my friends. My friends were the entire student body. And, the best part, new freedoms were being granted like so much confetti at a new years eve celebration.

Not that there were no dark clouds on the horizon. Although our school was totally desegregated (roughly, 1/3rd white; 1/3 black and 1/3rd asian) it was simply a reflection of the affordability of the houses there. If you were a WW II veteran, and who wasn’t, you could and did buy your family a home of their own. A first for just about everyone.

Given this context for my take on the world, I was bewildered by what I saw on TV about what was going  on across the states in the south. Separate but equal was an oxymoron to my way of thinking. How could separate be equal. Why was one color poor and the other color less poor. (Truth be told, that all looked considerably poorer than anyone I knew.)

Then, 50 years ago today, the Little Rock travesty was recorded and shown to the Nation. Dogs, powerful waterhoses, a lynching mentality were used by one color against the other color. The horrors of the civil war were being re-enacted for each of us to see. I was shaken to my core and nauseated in my heart. Why, why, why? My yellow brick roads were much less appealing then.