The Skinny Kid...

... with the funny name.

Is our president (ok, technically not yet mine because I'm not a citizen yet, but maybe in 4 year's time!!!).

And, would you believe it that I just heard for the very first time the speech that started it all? It's been over four years and it's just so amazing to look back. His audacity of hope got him there...

... the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.

Oh, yes, it sure does! The most coveted, the most prominent place... it's almost unbelievable.

And, like Larry King said yesterday, answering a question that, very curiously, had been raised by a Brazilian writer over 82 years ago (more on this in a minute), we don't ever have to ask ourselves whether one day the U.S. will have a Black president.

Back in Brazil in 1926 Monteiro Lobato, who later became famous as the founder of Brazilian children's literature, published a science fiction saga titled O presidente Negro (The Black President) about the U.S. electing a black president. I already knew about this book, obviously, but while searching for the publication date, I came across a Slate article about it published last September: "The Black President A 1926 Brazilian sci-fi novel predicts a U.S. election determined by race and gender." Cool, huh?

I want to end this by commenting on one last quote, something that a former civil rights leader Andrew Young wrote in Time magazine last week. Young remarks that Barack Obama is not a "typical" African American like himself and that this makes a lot of differece. Perhaps, all the difference. He writes:

He isn't just black; he's an Afro-Asian-Latin European. That means he's a global citizen and an all-American boy. He defies categorization. The fact that his father and grandfather on one side were black doesn't make him any more of a black President than his grandfather on the other side being white would make him a white President. We claim him, and we are proud of him, but the fact is that he has not had the experiences of deprivation, humiliation and racism that I had to grow up with — which is good. He has the label without the scars.

These are precisely the kinds of things that I've been thinking about for a while. And that last sentence? It's spot on. I wanted to elaborate, but I really have to go work on the online gig. I'll try to comment more on this tomorrow or later.