BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA II

No respectable blog can remain respectable without some comment on politics. Let me take a shot at it.

We've heard it time and again that Obama will be the first Black American President. Personally, I'm opposed to any classification of a person according to his race. If we are to be truly non-racialist, we should not think of him as a Black American any more than we should calculate the ethnic composition in his blood.

What surprised me when I first read about him is his name. Like most people my age, I'm not politically minded. But I received a spam email that says that Obama was related to Osama and that he was a devout Muslim. I looked at his full name and I thought to myself that it was the most un-Christian name I've ever heard. You can't baptise someone Barack, can you? St Barack? And what about Hussein? The only Hussein I know is Sadam and that chap definitely wasn't a Christian.

I may not be a racist and I don't care if you're purple or blue in colour and you hold the world's most important post: that of the US President but I would expect the President to be not related to Osama or Sadam Hussein.

For a while, I thought there was some truth in that email. But how could a relation of Osama run for President? So I checked wikipedia which gives the final word on anything. Guess what? He is a Christian, of the United Church of Christ. I've not heard of that but wikipedia says it's a mainline Protestant church in America. That means he can't be related to Osama or Sadam and even if he is, he can't have the same violent agenda as the two of them.

The moral of this story: Don't believe all the spam email you read. Barack Hussein Obama II, despite his very unusual name, is a Christian and is not an Osama or a Sadam Hussein. My advice to adults is to vote for the chap with the least pretension. I can't vote for anybody because I don't live in America and even if I did, ageist politicians have arbitrarily deprived me of the right to vote because of age. We can't talk about universal suffrage if we ban people below 18 from voting.