Saturday 6 September 2008

A Robbed Generation? A Robbed People?

Stuart Reid has focused in my mind something that had been there anyway. If Obama wins, then no one who actually served in Vietnam will ever be President of the United States.

And if either of them wins, then (since, for example, we have yet to see another woman Prime Minister, and she might never come along at all) not only will the first black President be nothing to do with the Civil Rights movement, and indeed not African-American in the original and ordinary sense of the term (one of America's two founding peoples, along with their close blood relatives among Americans of English, Scots, Welsh and Irish descent), but it is perfectly possible that nobody who is (black like Martin Luther King, black like Jesse Jackson, black like Al Sharpton, black like Condoleeza Rice, black like Alan Keyes, black like Clarence Thomas) will ever become President.

Is it just me, or does that seem like a sort of theft?

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