A life changing vote

I heard this on the radio this morning and had to share/comment if you didn't hear about it.
A woman by the name of Amanda (forgot the last name) who was born in 1899 and the child of a slave just voted yesterday at the age of 109. Can you imagine all that she has lived through? From the immediate effects of slavery, to Jim Crow to MLK to the possibility of a black president?

I would think she never imagined in her life time and the type of injustices she has surely seen that she could imagine an election such as this!

And not just on a racial front, she was a woman and women did not receive the right to vote until about 1920 so she lived through disenfranchisement to the (hopefully not) possibility of a female vice president, not to mention a democratic presidential campaign where the top candidates was a woman and a black man. What a real life progression for her!

I believed that in my lifetime I would see a minority or female president but I thought I would be much much older. On the show, the DJ said the smallest children of today will only know, at least for the first four to eight years of their lives, a minority president or a female vice president. The hope is that they see that and truly believe that anything is possible and hopefully to be more tolerant of one another.

I can only hope what having a black president would do for the image of the black man. People in our generation didn't have an MLK or Malcolm or WEB Duboise and so forth to look up to. Our biggest successes were athletes and rappers (even the respected actors like Morgan Freeman or Denzel Washington or Don Cheadle don't have the kind of clout that Diddy or Micheal Jordan has). This effects what our young aspire to be (speaking in generalities). What would it mean to have the most powerful black man be president? Would this make a difference, if even a small one, on the black, particularly male, youth? Hopefully we will get a chance to see...

VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*get's off soap box*