If President Barack Obama wins reelection, I would like everyone to print this out and put it away for safe-keeping.

Why? You may ask.

Simply this:

1. If he is reelected you will be soon unable to read this due to the onrush of censorship that will engulf the nation.
2. Our 2nd Amendment rights will be curtailed.
3. We will quickly move into a second recession that will see OFFICIAL unemployment stay around 8%, though actual unemployment will move to levels unseen America since the Great Depression.
4. The military will be gutted.
5. America’s energy dependence will increase dramatically, and gas prices will explode.
6. General Motors will collapse.
7. America will renounce its alliance with Israel and war will engulf the Middle East again.
8. Iran will produce and PUBLICLY detonate a nuclear bomb, perhaps over Israel.

These are my predictions. Print them out, file them away, and in four years look at them again. If I’m wrong, I will admit it and produce a mea culpa for you. But I won’t have to.

“If America reelects Barack Obama to a second term, we deserve all the misery that will ensue. “
Representative Allen West,
Republican-Florida

Truth and Prejudice

Thirty years ago I made the mistake of telling a trusted colleague of mine, that "I'm not prejudiced."

"Bullshit," he proclaimed. "Everyone is prejudiced about SOMEthing. It might be lawyers, or truck drivers, or another race.” And it was true. He then made the profound argument that where we will make a difference is how hard we work to fight that prejudice.

During that same period, there was another colleagues of mine who stunned me with a comment I always try to keep in perspective to this day. And I remember the shock I felt, and STILL do, when this colleague looked me in the eye and told me that he didn’t trust “really dark-skinned (black) folk.” You see, he was also black, just like my first colleague.

So, yeah, I am prejudiced.

I am so grateful for that period in my life. I worked for nearly three years in a sawmill in the deep south of the United States. Many of the men who worked there were the fathers, uncles and brothers of people I had gone to high school with, played football and ran track with, and one in particular sticks out. He was the father of a classmate and fellow football teammate. He worked hard and saw all of his half-dozen-or-so children attend college. And he was a completely illiterate black man. To this day I have the utmost respect for that man. He married and had children, and worked to provide for them. He didn't want help or handouts from anyone or anything. He helped to show me what life and the world and the people who live in it are all about.

What brought all this on? It was an NBC news poll (http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/27/14740413-ap-poll-majority-harbor-prejudice-against-blacks?threadId=3598754&commentId=71479014#c71479014) that gauged racial attitudes between 2008 and 2012. It found that “a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks…”

Well, we ARE all prejudiced in some way. Think about it. Is it lawyers you have a bad attitude about? Or barristas at Starbucks? How about cops? Maybe anorexic-looking supermodels? Or overweight people? Or maybe the homeless? Seriously, you know what your prejudices are. We all do. But, HOW MANY PEOPLE DO YOU KNOW THAT WANT TO BE PREJUDICED? I would wager that it is darned few.

If you're a friend of mine, you that I'm one of that group. But, my former colleague was right. We do all have prejudices.

I have spent all my adult life working hard to see past and through race, color, religion, creed, national origin, sexual preference, class, etc., and try equally as hard to understand people. I want to see through other’s eyes. And I refuse to allow others to classify ME by what they THINK they see. Clearly, it is how we contol, and how affective we are at controlling and defeating our prejudices that make us “color blind,” to use a more pointed term.

In the past six years I have been accused because of my political views of being a racist, a mysoginist, a sexist, a homophobe, and so-on-and-so-forth. And it hurts. Not so much because I am one or all of these things (remember, I am prejudiced), but rather because of the effort I have expended over the years to try to ensure I was NOT any of those things. It hasn’t been easy.

But, because of my efforts, I have cherished and dear friends, colleagues and acquaintances who are black, white, oriental and Hispanic. They are men and women, homosexual and heterosexual. They are corporate CEOs and presidents, and dirt-poor and in-between. They are lawyers and cops, fat and thin, short and tall, warriors (of at least a dozen nations) and draft dodgers, and they are smart and, well, dumb. They include Christians, Jews, Druids, pagans and Muslims, and complex combinations of all. They are all my friends, my colleagues, my acquaintances and I cherish them all, though admittedly some more than others. Interestingly, most of the people I see as enemies are the same race as I! But, as I have been taught by Jesus and my Christian upbringing, I love them all. Though, admittedly, I do love some more than others.

So it was with more than a little interest I read the NBC News article and the comments that followed. In the end, what I wonder most is just how much of this negative attitude, this prejudice, covered in the poll has to do with the gross mismanagement, corruption, and policies of division that have been practiced by the First Black President? A president I love as a human and a man.

But whose policies I deplore.

I guess that's ANOTHER prejudice I'll have to work on.