To Hillary’s Supporters: Please Don’t Leave the Country
Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo
Saturday, May 17, 2008
"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,' she said in an interview with USA Today. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article 'that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states (those voting in Tuesday's Indiana and North Carolina primaries) who had not completed college were supporting me. There's a pattern emerging here."
- Hillary Clinton to USA Today
Obviously, it must be hard on Hill. To
see what you have always thought was yours slipping away. Yeah, I should know. I
lost my first girlfriend that way.
It does not help that the fight was very intense. Supporters on all sides were fired up. The severity of the fight for the democratic presidential primaries made many of us extremists.
Well, the truth is that someone will have to win and another will have to lose. For the loser, it is never the end. You live to fight another day, if you resist the temptation to deploy MAD – mutual assured destruction.
But that is in an ideal world. Not in a world occupied by any of the Clintons. Theirs is a world where everything “depends on what is, is.”
This election has taught many of us new lessons. For one, I never knew that there are tribes and tribalists in America. I had always thought there were just races and racism.
Until
recently, I had thought that swing voters were independent minded people who
swing to one side or another based on major issues of importance to them. Now I
know that swing voters are a code name for Hillary’s poor and uneducated
lunch-bag White voters.
I had known that Obama’s emergence as a major candidate will raise a lot of issues. I know many will put up resistance for many reasons- some real, some fake and some a mask for the unspoken reason. After all, it is in human nature to be scared of the unknown.
At every crossroad, all societies react this way. Some will panic. Some will warn that the world as we know it will come to an end. It is common to hear erstwhile sensible adults threatening to leave the country and pleading with the last to leave to remember to switch off the light.
There is no greater sign that change is in the air than when signs like these are raised up across road junctions.
Calmer
souls will tell you that we have seen it all before. It happened during the
fight to abolish slavery; during the civil rights fights; during women
liberation fight; during the cold war etc. The Republic is resilient. It has the
means to outlast our fears. The Republic will survive it all.
If the Republic survived the Bush-Cheney onslaught and we are alive today to freely campaign, it shall all be well at the end.
When change is in the air, when destiny is on the march, it has factored in that many will oppose it. That many will say over their dead bodies. But destiny is not afraid of opposition. It is not afraid of dead bodies. It has been there before and it knows that it will prevail – for it is written.
Some Hillary supporters will eventually calm down. Some will be angry till the end. Some will defect to John McCain. Some will abstain. But they will all be alive to see the presidency of Barack Obama.
To their shock, they will see that the heavens will not fall. The light of these United States will not go off because Obama is elected president. Like John McCain who voted against Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday, one day, those who oppose Obama today will go in front of Obama’s memorial and confess how wrong they were.
Just remember then that you read it here first.
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Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo will be signing copies of his book, Children of a Retired God at the 100 Cummings Center, suite 221 E, Beverley, Massachusetts on Sat. June 14th at 5pm; at Igwebuike Hall in Hapeville, near Atlanta International Airport, Georgia on Sat. June 28th at 8.pm and at the People’s Club Hall in Boston on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 8.00pm. For more information, contact Ehimen Edokpa at Integrity Business Group, 129 Union Street, Lynn, Phone: 978-335-4451. More dates and venues will be announced as soon as they become available. His latest books, How I Helped Elect Obama President & Africa: The Shit that Happened will be out soon.