THE CONSTITUTION IS WHOLE

On January 20, 2009, Americans celebrated a wonderful day. It was not that for the 44th time we witnessed the peaceful transition of power, a most unlikely occurrence anywhere else on God’s green earth. Nor was it the rhetorically fine speech or political slogans or the coolness of having young children in the White House. Rather, it was that the departure of the Constitution from our Declaration had come full circle, marked in our history by the struggles of all Americans.

There remain detractors and baiters, those who harbor the remnants of heart generated bigotry, where a sign still hangs in the window of a restaurant on some backwoods dirt road, population ten, or in the words of a preacher on this very day stating, "When whites will embrace what is right.” Let there be no doubt that the radical idea, birthed of a white slaveholder, became embodied in the ascent to the nations highest office of the son of an African.

A defect in our Constitution, the mending of which began with the election of Lincoln, continued through the long years of Jim Crow, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and ‘65, was completed on this unbelievable and inspiring day. As imperfect as our history depicts us to have been, no other place could have produced a day where the first black president stood to say, “We will not apologize for our way of life.”

I also will not apologize for not voting for the man. While the significance of the day will be harbored in my heart forever and the reflections and writings of my mother and father who stood to applaud those who marched from our interracially mixed church here in Oroville, who worked and toiled by our black friends, and with whose children I studied and played and fought, and by whom I was placed in the seat of a big old Lincoln Continental, to learn to drive at thirteen, to navigate the winding roads of backcountry Butte County, along with the following of the map to a receptive and open heart of a young man willing to avail his mind to truth about God and life. Jim Anderson was that man and none of this is about the individual, but the spirit and soul and the righteousness of the man. It is to that end that we will judge the success of our new President and not the color of his skin. It will be in that context that I will defend the values of this great country and it is those, which I believe he will destroy with a far left agenda and a socialist anti capitalist fervor that will dismantle the very system that led to his rise to power. God bless him while I stand against him, God help us all. B.C.