Over the weekend, I had a house full of very rich Republicans from a virtually all-Republican town in Connecticut who were staying at my bed and breakfast because all their daughters attend camp nearby.

They're all voting for Barack. None have ever voted for a Democrat in a presidential election. But they can't stand John McCain and think Barack is the visionary leader our nation has long been starving for.

People of Berlin. People of the world.

Today, I feel tremendous pride in my country.

200,000 people showed up to hear Barack deliver his major speech in Berlin yesterday.

Many of them were waving American flags. Barack was not booed nor heckled. Nor was he worshiped.

The crowd listened, applauded, chanted a few O-BA-MA's. Often, the camera revealed pensive people, intent people, expressionless, not even applauding, pondering the weight of every single word.

There was little to indicate a throng of listeners caught up in the hysteria of watching a rock star, despite the chorus of corporate media shills and demoralized detractors.

I LOVE the rawness of this:

"He's welcome to our war-torn city," said Habibullah Hamdard, a 42-year-old teacher. "If he has loved his children, he should love the Afghan children who are dying around the country every day. The white guy couldn't do anything, let's see what the black guy can do."

The late great James Baldwin, my favorite author and intellectual, wrote in The Devil Finds Work, a brutal collection of essays on American film:

"IDENTITY would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt and sometimes discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change robes."

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People are so afraid. So afraid to end one cycle and begin another, full of newness and love, pregnant with the possibility of transcendence. Fear begets fear. And with hardly any nurturing whatsoever, fear matures to thieving terror.

This from The Fist Couple: Giving a Big Bump to Authenticity

Dap, fist pound, whatever you want to call it-- it's definitely something we're not used to seeing on the national political stage.

"It thrilled a lot of black folks," said author and commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates, who blogs at ta-nehisi.com. Why? Because it's the kind of gesture that, while commonplace in the African American community, was generally stifled by earlier generations of blacks working their way up into the corporate or political worlds for fears "about looking too black," he said. But Obama "is past that. . . . He wears his cultural blackness all over the place." (Remember his aping of Jay- Z's "dirt off your shoulder" move in a recent speech?) "It's liberating to be able to run for president as a black man. . . . Barack is like Black Folks 2.0."

Friday, May 30

I almost changed my mind.

When I walked up to the Augusta Convention Center and saw all the campaign signs and professionally printed flyers plastered on all the entrance doors, the makeshift nametag I'd thrown together using clear packing tape, Glue Stic and an old name tag holder from a Book Expo years ago seemed totally inadequate. What did I think I was running for, anyway? Student council president?

No way would could I compete with any of this. I'd had no idea what to expect, and I surely didn't expect this. Perhaps my quest to get elected as a national delegate to Denver would have to remain a dream. Like the recurring one I have of you walking up our driveway with that look of love always on your face to see the completed renovations, which you never got to see before you left us just over a year ago.

It is with great awe that I report that I was elected yesterday as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in August.

I follow politics. I don't run for stuff.

HE CAME BACK TO US. He walked right into the kitchen where Mama, Gina, Job and I were eating a fried catfish dinner I’d thrown together at the end of long, hot, emotional day.

crossposted to Fumbling Toward Divinity

So, in the last week, today inclusive, we have:

Barack Obama draws 75,000 people, almost all of them white, to a rally in Portland, Oregon. The corporate broadcast media hardly notices. I guess the revolution won't be televised after all.

Hillary wins Kentucky big; Obama wins Oregon big. The media obsesses over Obama's "problem" with white voters.

All the Clinton surrogates go on air and say that Hillary has won the popular vote.

crossposted to Fumbling Toward Divinity

AT THE AGE OF 34, Barack Obama became an orphan when his mother died of ovarian cancer. His father, who abandoned him when he was two and whom he only saw once, died in a car accident in Kenya when Barack was around 20.

Yesterday, before Barack gave an address to the Crown Nation in Crow Agency, Montana, he got new parents.