By Marcus Murphree
I will come out and say it – I am not the most political
person.
Call me an apathetic youth, call me uninvolved, go ahead and
say I’m part of the problem because I don’t care about the future.
But I’ll be honest, throwing pamphlets and money around
endorsing a person I have never met does not particularly interest me and it
seems a little bit defeating.
However, I did vote in the election, I saw four of the
candidates on the campaign trail, and I did listen to what they had to say – even
if I saw it all as a series of canned speeches. For those that think I don’t
care, you are gravely mistaken.
I work in an industry that is represented by the First
Amendment, I know I am protected by our laws if I am in a court room, and I
know there are thousands of men and women looking out for these rights that I
do hold close to my heart.
So I might be callous and make jokes about the freshly
inaugurated president, but don’t think I would not have done the same to Sen.
McCain and Gov. Palin.
We have the ability to laugh at our public figures, and it
is a constitutional right, so don’t think people are being crass and rude if
they are making fun of the repetitive inflection of Barack Obama’s voice or
when Tina Fey wears her hair in a bun like Sarah Palin.
Remember, we have that right to free speech and expression.
We do this, in a way, because we care.
Today marked one of the most historic events in American
politics. Personally, I would rank this somewhere between the Kennedy
assassination and the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
This is not to say the Kennedy shooting is a banner moment
in political history, but it is because that alleged bullet from Lee Harvey
Oswald’s bolt-action rifle represented a time of null-acceptance in America, which luckily is no longer the case.
JFK
was and still stands as the only Catholic president America
has ever seen, and he represented the youthful progression that America needed
during a time of what some would call “an empty war.”
Today, a new man was sworn into office and America changed
again forever.
There were probably hurtful, racist chants uttered from the
crowd, but when President Obama stood at the foot of the Capitol’s West Front, Americana across the board knew times were going to be different.
No longer does being a WASP fit the bill for being
president.
No longer does military experience need to be the
identifying factor of a good leader.
The year of 2008 was hard on America, and now is the time
to change and embrace any differences in the coming era.
Go ahead and say I am “liberal media” and on my soap box.
For the record, I voted for the other guy.
Marcus Murphree is the
Garland/Wylie/Sachse editor for neighborsgo
and can be reached at mmurphree@neighborsgo.com.
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