Respects to Obama From a McCainite

I remember that day in 1974 as if it were yesterday. The angry young black man on the basketball team struck me in the sternum, cracking it, for no reason except that I was talking to a friend. I see a continuum between that day and the days in which his ancestors were enslaved by whites in my region, and on to the explosion of riots and anger that expressed itself in our schools most violently in 1970, and for several years after. Although I did not cause it, and could not have prevented it, I owed that experience to the Northern industrialists and Southern slave owners who were then only shadows, long forgotten. W. H. Auden said it best in his poem "September 1, 1938" (the date of the invasion of Poland by the Nazis):

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

So, why will I support Obama as President? That is, why will I support him after he may be elected? It will not be because I voted for him, because I will not have. Rather, I will support him because he will be my President. Moreover, I suspect that I will learn to love to support him. He is culturally neither black nor white, but may well lift the eyes of young black men from their shoes to his face, and away from any anger; a beacon of hope for alienated people; and we will have more black doctors, black lawyers, black scientists, black Fathers. I will not support him because I support socialism, for I do not. I will still worry at the harm his leadership of conjoined houses of socialist majority can do. But I am foolish enough to believe that he will have none of it, in order to unify the country for dark days ahead. I believe that he will not raise taxes because he will know that this will unhinge the small businesses still struggling and plunge us directly into depression. I believe that his socialist supporters will be disappointed, for he will not intend to do that with which he was required to sympathize in order to have the chance for election. For similar reasons, I do not believe he will dismantle nor weaken our military. He is one cool number, and he may be just the president we need. But if Providence deems it so, and the vote is tied save mine, then God will need to send two more votes for the fine black man with the wonderful white grandmother.