Dreams from My Father - 1

Dreams from My Father – 1
cinops be gone Friday, October 17, 2008 A.M.

Preface: Character, judgment and who do you trust? This is the first in a series of selected excerpts from Barack Obama’s book about himself, not yet ready for the presidency. As a McCain supporter, I want to understand the mind and heart of Obama from his life experiences. Secondly, as an activist in the pro-life movement, why he is not pro-life? Most black Americans are pro-life and believe that the true definition of marriage is between a man and a woman.

“He was an African, I would learn, a Kenyan of the Luo tribe, born on the shores of Lake Victoria in a place called Alego. The village was poor, but his father – my grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama – had been a prominent farmer, an elder of the tribe, a medicine man with healing powers.
My father grew up herding his father’s goats and attending the local school, set up by the British colonial administration, where he had shown great promise. He eventually won a scholarship to study in Nairobi; and then on the eve of Kenyan independence, he had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States…
In 1959, at the age of twenty-three, he arrived at the University of Hawaii as that institution’s first African student. He studied econometrics, worked with unsurpassed concentration, and graduated in three years at the top of his class. His friends were legion, and he helped organize the International Students Association, of which he became the first president.
In a Russian language course, he met an awkward, shy American girl, only eighteen, and they fell in love. The girl’s parents, wary at first, were won over by his charm and intellect; the young couple married, and she bore them a son to whom he bequeathed his name… That my father looked nothing like the people around me – that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk – barely registered in my mind…. p. 9-10
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(Kansas) That was the world in which my grandparents had been raised, the dab-smack, landlocked center of the country, a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty. They had grown up less than twenty miles away from each other – my grandmother in Augusta, my grandfather in El Dorado, towns too small to warrant boldface on a road map – and the childhoods they liked to recall for my benefit portrayed small-town, Depression-era America in all its innocent glory: Fourth of July parades and the picture shows on the side of a barn; fireflies in a jar and the taste of vine-rip tomatoes, sweet as apples; dust storms and hailstorms … p. 13
Even the trauma of bank failures and farm foreclosures seemed romantic when spun through the looms of my grandparents’ memories…. So you had to listen carefully to recognize subtle hierarchies and unspoken codes that had policed their early lives, the distinctions of people who don’t have a lot and live in a middle of nowhere. It had to do with something called respectability – there were respectable people and not-so-respectable people – and although you didn’t have to be rich to be respectable, you sure had to work harder at it if you weren’t…”

George H. Kubeck,