Monday Matters: Hope for Obama
Monday, November 10th, 2008It was my hope that Obama would become our 44th President. And while I didn’t make that hope public from the pulpit, I did not hide it from those who asked or in public comments that I left in various places around the internet.
So of course, I am happy that last Tuesday evening my hope became reality.
Now, there are lots and lots of reasons why I hoped this would come true, and one of them was very selfish and personal. As many of you know, my wife and I are currently in the process of adopting from Ethiopia. It is our hope to adopt 2 children, either twins or a sibling group, who are under the age of 4.
While in many ways it seems like the right thing for us to do, it was never an easy decision. We are well aware of the history of racism in our country. So one of our primary concerns in adopting children from Africa, is taking them from a place where racism (as we know it in our country) is not an issue and bringing them to a country where it is.
As we learned in our ‘pre-adoption’ classes, adopting can be difficult, adopting cross-culturally is even harder, and adopting children who will no-doubt experience racism, in ways we as white parents will never be able to comprehend, is still more difficult.
So for me, the election of Barak Obama as our 44th President is a glimmer of hope that our country is prepared to move passed its racist history, and that it will somehow become just a little bit easier for us to raise our two children who will come from Africa.
Plus, I love the fact that we now have such a prominent role model to point our children too, and that we will be able to say to them, “You can become President too.”
Well, except for that minor thing about our children not being natural born citizens of the US…but we have 40 years or so to work with congress on changing that one…

