No, You Can’t

Conservatards never cease to amaze me. I may be the only liberal on earth who enjoys reading conservative blogs. It’s my entertainment, sick as it may be. I get giddy when I discover a new one. The fresh meat I speak of is Paul Ibrahim. Michelle Malkin touted his post about not needing Barack Obama to tell him “Yes, he can,” because he already knew he could. But, actually, no he can’t.

“Did Americans, including the poor and minorities, sincerely believe that success was limited by anything other than their own initiative? Did we Americans truly need Obama’s election to finally start believing that we could be anything we wanted to be? Did we not hope, did we not think that “we can,” before Obama told us that we should?”

Yes, Mr. Ibrahim, they did. Maybe you didn’t need Mr. Obama’s election to tell you that you could be whatever you dreamed to be, but there are millions who did. People who witnessed the civil right fights of the 60s, where certain segments of the population–not lucky enough to have the right skin tone–experienced legal discrimination. Certainly, they hoped, and were told insomuch to keep that hope alive. Easier said than done.  A legacy of inferiority exists, created by the oppression of enslavement, but, sadly, continued by social and political apathy. What Mr. Obama’s win did was to reawaken that hope, or make it clear that the oppression has moved out of the hands of The Man and into their own hands.  That success in America does not come with a white-only, rich-only tag. But it comes with a self-determination tag. The “I Matter, Therefore I Will Thrive” tag. That you are, in fact, in charge of your own destiny.  Which maybe you already knew, but others are finally believing.

“I was born into the Lebanese civil war, both chronologically and geographically. My earliest memories are those of hiding in a makeshift bunker, huddling to pray with my family and neighbors, while a barrage of fire rained down outside. My other memories are those of constantly hearing gunfire while in school, and of speeding on more than one occasion toward a ship that would take refugees to the nearby island of Cyprus when the burden became just too much to bear.

I lived in a country ruled by neighboring Syria, with an unstable society and an economy in tatters, until my parents made the best decision of their lives – bringing my sisters and me to America.”

And here we have the issue. You left a situation that your family felt was hopeless, and brought you to a country that was better–the best, I’m sure you’ll agree. Imagine living in the country that’s the best and being hopeless. Whether that is the reality or not, it’s the people’s reality. There is a history there, a history you have not walked in, in THIS country. I am impressed with your life, but I’d be even more impressed if you’d done it in Lebanon. You didn’t, though. You did it here, with no discriminatory history; certainly with no legal discriminatory history.

And going by the conservatives reaction to Obama possibly being a Muslim or “Arab,” even if you were born in this country and able to run for President, your chances would be even less. So you don’t even count. Must hurt. True Americans can run for President. You never can, so you’re just an Arab-American, a hyphenated American…just how the consevatards like you. Smile.

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