[BretLudwig]

http://ibloga.blogspot.com/2008/04/y...eople-who.html


"You're talking about white people who have neither the family
connections nor the racial credentials to gain entrance to the world that
you inhabit

OOPSI....I feel bad I never read this gal before. This is a Dowd level
disembowelment.
Read this little ditty because every point she makes drives a stake
through the entire Barack Obama reason for being.
mary_grabar.jpg

Yes, Barack Obama, We Are Bitter
By Mary Grabar

Mary Grabar earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of
Georgia and teaches in the Atlanta area. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated
poet and published fiction writer. Visit her website and get on her mailing
list at marygrabar.com

We know who you're talking about, Barack Obama, when you talk
about Pennsylvania and the Midwest, about small towns where the jobs have
left. We know who you're talking about when you talk about those who "get
bitter" and "cling to guns or religion."

You're talking about "those people."

You're talking about white people who have neither the family
connections nor the racial credentials to gain entrance to the world that
you inhabit. Many of the people you're talking about are those whose
parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants from Central
and Eastern Europe who came to these places to work in steel mills, coal
mines, and factories. We know the code words.

(EFFING A, HONEY !)

You're talking about people whose culture is little known. We have
been pretty quiet. We never tried to impose our culture on everyone. We
never insisted on putting pictures of ourselves in our native dress into
schoolbooks or mandating that our stories and songs be part of the
curriculums.

(Can you believe how on target this chick is?)

We tried to maintain our culture without government aid, by
forming our own churches and groups, and building Polish, Ukrainian, and
Slovenian halls.
ukrainian american.jpg

We never wore buttons declaring "Slav Power" or grouped together
for purposes of intimidation or violence.

The power we asked for was the power of the paycheck which we
earned in factories, steel mills, coal mines, or by cleaning houses. Yet,
we were taken aside and told that because of affirmative action it was no
use trying to advance off the assembly line; we were told in "diversity
workshops" that people of color had to be promoted over more qualified
white people. I know this, Barack, because I have family members and
friends who worked in factories.

We used to trudge in to work and change into work clothes, like my
father did. He began by knowing only one word of English, "Okay," which he
found to be the most useful one in the language. When the boss man handed
him a broom or pointed to a piece to be welded, he fairly leapt to the
task. My uncles were injured in construction and mining accidents, and
went back to work.

But what did we get for that, Barack? We paid cash for our houses
and kept impeccable yards, yet saw the value of our homes plummet after
marauding hoodlums came into our neighborhoods in riots that were
celebrated by the intelligentsia in Manhattan penthouses, who saw such
violence as justified expressions of outrage over past discrimination.

(hmmm...I see charges of of reactionary racist bourgeoisie
selfishness coming from Barack bud Ayers on this one..better watch out
Mary)

We went to public schools in those same neighborhoods only to be
accosted for our skin color and the presumed "privilege" that teachers
said we had. Rather than teach us what was good and beautiful about
Western Civilization and the country to which our parents had fled,
teachers gave us Marxist nonsense, if they bothered to teach at all. Our
schoolmates saw the evening news, mimicked their elders by wearing "Black
Power" buttons and felt justified in roughing the white kid who didn't
seem tough. Because we were "privileged"--despite washing our fathers'
sooty work clothes while our mothers went off to clean offices and houses
in the suburbs--we were not eligible for scholarships, not even to the
Catholic schools. Teachers never cut us any slack. Guidance counselors
told us to be secretaries or work in the factory, despite our volunteering
and demonstration of academic abilities. Our brothers, cousins, and uncles
went off to fight in Vietnam, while those from your class took up arms
against their campus administrators.

True, we had our problems, as all people do, with such things as
alcoholism and family violence, but we handled those ourselves, and never
blamed "society" or a history of oppression. Still, many of us did carry
legacies from the old country, of hunger and persecution, of watching
family members and villagers murdered by atheistic regimes. So we were
grateful for the opportunity to work and buy our own little patches of the
American Dream.

We were happy to use a welding torch, shovel, or broom to get
them. We didn't insist that we should all get college degrees. We didn't
have our documents translated for us or get bilingual instruction. If we
didn't know English we made sure our children did and we relied on them.

Your white friends in San Francisco, Barack, probably had cleaning
women like my mother (and me when I accompanied her and then had my own
cleaning jobs from age 12). As white people from a certain class and with
certain connections, your donors knew that their futures would be secure
because of their inheritances and the connections they could make in the
media, politics, and business. In fact, it would benefit them in the world
of "radical chic" to hang around those like you and support your policies.
(Great opportunity to be photographed next to a black person!)

Your black friends there, like your wife, see no end to the amount
that this country owes them because of what happened to their ancestors. It
makes no difference that many of the whites in previous generations also
had experienced persecution and hunger and worked in dangerous, dirty, and
degrading jobs. Or that blacks and Native Americans were among the slave
owners.

In fact, you and those wealthy donors sneer at white people who
have had to do manual labor and who have paid for tuition at community
colleges with the money earned that way, while our classmates received
special scholarships and government grants--from our taxes.

(Let's all remember at THIS point as we taste the soup Mary has
cooked up here, that she and her parents exist in the DEAD CENTER of FDR
and HST's democratic party..that which made up the most important majority
of the 20th century. DEAD CENTER)

You sneer at those like us who put our faith in God and not in
those like you who would presume to know what's good for us and tell us
what to do with our money and our children, and leave us with no ability
to defend ourselves.
st_nicholas church.jpg

Well, Barack, coming from your Ivy League world, you would not
know much about us. You would not have learned that because we come from
people who, rather than letting their communist benefactors redistribute
the food, burned the crops in their little fields before they were
forcibly "collectivized." In Slovenia, they fought Tito's Partisans from
the woods and held mass at night when the Communists banned church
services. They remember what it's like to be hungry, ill, and living in
little more than huts, while Marshall Tito and his communist cronies lived
in villas. Now you live in a Chicago mansion and sneer at those like us who
simply want to keep and defend our little three-bedroom ranches. You don't
know what it's like to have family members die for the right to attend
mass.

I know your liberal cronies, Barack; they make me check off my
skin color on job applications and ask me during job interviews of how I
teach multiculturalism, yet don't know where Slovenia is on the world map.
They couldn't care less about my culture, nor about Polish, Ukrainian,
Russian, or Lithuanian culture.

(GOAL !)

Your supporters often feel free to mock my Slovenian heritage in
letters and comments on the Internet when they disagree with me. I guess
it's like being called a "dumb Polack"--something that has never gained
quite the opprobrium of other ethnic epithets.

See, Barack, we know the system: Some are more "equal" than
others.

And we know how you really feel about the "proletariat." We know
this from our experience either directly or as an inheritance from our
parents and grandparents. And that is why we came to America.

Addendum: Many of my non-European correspondents, like those who
came from Cuba, agree--as their letters to me indicate."


http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4382

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