I have been so damned angry lately that I've found it hard to sit down and write something coherent about the condition of the country I live in and love. I find it so difficult to contain my rage at what the MSM (masters of smear and malice) abetted by Hillary and the Reverend Wright have been doing to Barack Obama, not to mention what Barack Obama is doing to Barack Obama by feinting and jabbing rather than administering a knockout blow at his opponents.
Barack, it is okay to be an angry black man if the black man is as brilliant and caring as you are. Trust me - a little well placed anger would become you. I sure don't want to be the only one who is angry these days.
I was a reluctant supporter of Obama. After flirting with Hillary's tough yet teary jack-in-the-box candidacy I began to see in Barak Obama a necessary healing sanity, and an ability to start the long process that could reclaim this country from the moral, economic, and intellectual devastation of the Bush years. No traitor to this country could have accomplished by the theft and sale of state secrets the harm that George Bush has wrought upon these United States. Aside from a mindless war and a failing economy, he managed the deregulation of decency and the outsourcing of morality. These have been the main accomplishments of his administration, and I feared it would continue under John McCain lasting well beyond our lifetimes.
I was concerned that the Bush years had bred into people a selfishness and callousness that would further harden and corrupt the country. I feared that we were living in a new Gilded Age, like the one that followed the Civil War, in which corruption, indifference, theft and greed - as well as racial segregation - triumphed.
And then suddenly, today, I calmed down thanks to a runaway black and white puppy, a frightened schpoodle who went haywire on Second Avenue and 70th Street in New York, a puppy who rescued me from my cynicism, and I saw again the basic decency in people and felt some hope for the future.
I was walking across this huge street in Manhattan with the traffic light in my favor, the six lanes of downtown traffic halted, mostly monster trucks and commuting drivers impatient to get to a bridge or a tunnel which would get them out of the city on a Friday afternoon. I had just reached the safety of the sidewalk on the other side of the street when suddenly a little black and white schpoodle (half schnauzer, half poodle) escaped his leash and began to run wildly across the wide, heavily trafficked street - a virtual highway within the city - darting one way and the other while his young, panicked owner shouted for him to come to her, and he - as frightened as his owner - eluded all her efforts to stop or stay still so that she could grab hold of him and place the leash back on him.
He was in the middle of the street when the light changed, a light which now allowed the trucks and cars to proceed. I'm no hero, but I am a crazy dog lover, so I rushed into the midst of the traffic, and waved my arms (as crazy and as futile I suppose as the legendary Viking King Canute who ordered the waves to stop) while the frightened dog ran back and forth, eluding his mistress and other pedestrians who tried to catch him on the street, and on the sidewalk which he touched like a base runner before darting into traffic again and running about in circles of panic.
The trucks and cars gunned their engines and I thought that the puppy was a goner; and me as well as I tried to catch him. But to my surprise, the traffic did not move.
I looked around and saw that I had been suddenly joined by more than a dozen other pedestrians who stood in the middle of Second Avenue - all of us forming a human chain - preventing the traffic from moving - giving the young woman enough time to finally capture her errant puppy. Amazingly, no truck or car honked. They waited for two lights to change - something unheard of in New York - until the animal was now safe.
I can't tell you how great it felt to see people come together spontaneously to save one small puppy. Okay, I am a sucker for dogs, but for that one brief moment I became a sucker for people too and I felt that maybe, just maybe, the election won't turn out as bad as I feared it might.