Obama image

What a special year this is for America, and minorities in general. Tomorrow will be the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first person of color, and ironically it comes the day after the Martin Luther King, Jr holiday. Back on the day after Mr. Obama was elected, I posted a video that had Sam Cooke singing "A Change Is Gonna Come", and in that video you see some of the bad things about segregation, and some of the changes that occurred, and there's a small passage with Dr. King in the video.

This year becomes special because without Dr. King doing his thing, Mr. Obama would have never been elected this soon. Sure, we can say 41 years is a long time, and yet it's not. It's not a long time when one can say that they were a young child when these things were happening, and they're still middle aged. Goodness, just two years ago no one gave him a chance to win, and here we are, on the precipice of history, with the possibility of more than a million people descending on Washington D.C. to try to get even a little glimpse of him accepting his place as president of the United States. No, I'll be at home, watching on TV; too cold, and too many people for me.

It's odd to think of things in this fashion, but when Dr. King spoke in Washington back on August 28th, 1963, over 250,000 people were there, and at that time it was considered the largest demonstration on record. That was later topped by Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March on October 16, 1995, of anywhere between 400,000 and 825,000 people, mainly men of course. And now, the inauguration of Mr. Obama may top them all; who'd have ever thought that so many people would come out to see one black man (okay, mixed race for those of you who just need to say it) could bring so many people together, people who have no other reason for being there except for this feeling of being a part of history? Absolutely amazing, if you ask me.

Anyway, last year I resisted the temptation to post the video to Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech, because I thought many people people would be using it, and I turned out to be right. So, I'm posting it this year, but with a twist. Instead of posting the video with him standing there at the Washington Monument, I'm posting a video entitled "The Urgency Of Now", which seems fitting based on what's going to occur tomorrow, showing many scenes of where we as a race of people have come from, and, hopefully, leading to what we hope is the place we're heading towards. No, racism isn't over tomorrow; but it takes a major hit.