"Can't we all just get along?"

Dear Editor:

Before President-Elect, Barack Obama, was elected president on Nov. 4, 2008, I had a little phrase I used to describe my feelings on the kind of racism, bigotry, and outright ignorance I encountered throughout the various political debates and discussions I had engaged in. I described myself as someone who hated hatred and was intolerant of intolerance.

The more I heard Obama's call for a unified country, one calling for an end to the red-state, blue-state divide, one calling for Americans of all races to come together, the more I felt like I was just as bad as the people who, without blinking an eye, would turn from useful discussions about policy and the direction our country could potentially go, to saying he was a Marxist, a Muslim, and the infamous N-word that people seem to think is as acceptable as the word "the."

That whole process led me to think of the phrase, "Can't we all just get along?" It is something even Rodney King, after being viciously beaten by members of the LAPD, was willing to utter. Even he, after suffering first hand, more than most other Americans, the evils of racism and a belief that the white race is supreme to all others, seemed able to see the need not for revenge and violence, but for a call for us all to come together and love instead of hate.

Martin Luther King Jr. also, instead of saying let black people show that they are better, as some who have a false image of reverse racism leading Obama to the Whitehouse probably believe, he called for people to be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

It's something that I thought I would see dwindle after we finally elected a black man as our president. It felt like, at least to some extent, the evils of racism were being overtaken by the good of understanding and acceptance. Although we have come a long way from the 60s, or the era of slavery, we must not forget that it's not over.

I still hear people refer to Obama and other black people as a number of things that I feel I'm a little too intelligent to repeat. I still hear people saying he only got elected because he was black. That's like saying someone only runs the fastest because they weigh 500 pounds. It doesn't make any sense. I would just like to say to those people, "Can't we all just get along?"

Thanks for reading,

Joel Jeffries

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