CONGRATULATIONS AMERICA! : You Didn't Put a Slave Owner in the White House!

I am thirty years old, Hispanic, a small business woman, and daughter of a retired Army Master Sergeant and...

My deep, dark, secret... Seriously.


My fellow Americans, I did not vote for Barack Obama.

That statement seems so unpatriotic after the $170M (What recession?) pomp and circumstance displayed yesterday as we welcomed our new Commander in Chief.

However, I like millions of Americans, joined in the celebration of a truly magnificent moment in our nation's history. Much to my boyfriend's dismay - Netflix movies arrived that we've wanted to see and songs on Guitar Hero that needed to be conquered - we began the week by watching the We Are One Concert Sunday night at the Lincoln Memorial.

I was touched by the obviously moved presenters and performers and teared up as I sang along to Garth Brook's We Shall Be Free. (Yes, imagine that! A Puerto Rican who loves country!)

I continued in the excitement through the morning of the Inauguration from sunrise, minute by minute, never skipping a moment while I worked throughout the day with my laptop on my lap and ABC's Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson keeping me company with the latest news and information.

As I watched the President take his oath of office, I was filled with pride in a nation that saw past the color of a man's skin and elected him to our country's highest office.

And I cried when Aretha Franklin's eyes sparkled as she belted out "My Country 'Tis of Thee" in the fulfillment of Dr. Martin Luther King's beloved dream.

I too shared in the remarkable moment as the stories my own grandmother echoed in my mind about the difficulties of being a single working mother with dark toffee colored skin...

The way she has about her, when I call her still furious from another encounter at a department store where an absent-minded person will ask me to help them with their purchase because they assume I must work there since it's the middle of the day during a work week, and I have kinky hair and I look like I speak Spanish.

"Dori, it's because you're not afraid to look a person in the eye and smile, not because you look like you work there!

These days no one has it in them to stand tall, walk proud, with purpose and pride and be confident enough to really see the people around them; therefor you must work there...

Don't change who you are because others keep themselves closed in a bubble unable to see the world around them."


I watched the swearing in, the speech quoting great leaders of our country, watched Laura and George Bush wave goodbye as they boarded Executive One, watched the parade wondering WHAT ON EARTH Michelle was thinking wearing that outfit in twenty degree weather, danced to the incredible drum lines in the parade as I made dinner, and then curled up to watch the Neighborhood Ball where I once again questioned the choice of the First Lady's fashion sense as she glided onto the stage in what appeared to be an unflattering toga with pasted on feathers and cotton balls!

And, I cried at Beyonce's emotional serenade as the new President and First Lady danced for the first time...

You could feel the love and adoration that Obama and Michelle feel for one another. It was truly a spectacular moment.

As the ball continued and Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson continued to MC the day, ABC began to include editorials on notable people and events relating to the historical event.


A segment featuring the descendants of a slave family from the McCain Plantation in Mississippi changed the tone of the day for me.

I remember watching the segment, looking back at Todd and saying,

"I can't believe of all the stories they could have shared tonight, that's the one they chose!"

It told the story of Mary and Lillie McCain who's great grandfather worked for the ancestors of John McCain. The narrator of the story emphasized,

"If you're wondering about the name, yes, they carry the name of their white slave owner McCain, ancestors of Senator John McCain."

The story detailed the family's plight as freedom fighters and ultimate successes overcoming racial discrimination.

Diane Sawyer finished the segment by explaining that when both the Senator and the President were contacted about the story that their response was,

"...with incredible emotional unity, that there is only one way to redeem it, it is that together we must give them opportunity, give everyone, every child the opportunity, it's the only way to redeem this."

I however question the timing and placement of this editorial.

With so many questioning the role of the media in this election I was shocked that segment was aired in the middle of the night's festivities and even more bewildered that it was sugar-coated as an accidental ironic coincidence, topped off with an insulting inquisition of a respected member of our country.


What can someone say in response to,

"Senator McCain, How do you feel about your ancestors having slaves?"

I am not in any way demeaning the suffering of the McCain family's ancestors, nor am I in any way making light of Senator McCain's ancestor's use of slavery - what I AM questioning is ABC's judgment in airing such a story on the night of "unity and a momentous moment in history".

It almost felt as if it was a

"CONGRATULATIONS AMERICA! You didn't put a slave owner in the White House!" declaration!

It was awkward and incredibly inappropriate. The anchor panel even seemed trapped in uncomfortable silence at the end of the story.

I can appreciate the irony as much as the next guy -

"the Senator whose ancestors had slaves - loses to a man who's half Kenyan."

BUT THEN SAY IT!

JUST LIKE THAT!

Spell it out in black and white (no pun intended).

Don't put the anchors and reporters of that story in such an obviously uncomfortable position to make good TELEVISION - because it was just that - not good reporting, but good Reality TV.

SHAME ON YOU ABC!

I doubt our new President would have appreciated the tone you created on a night meant to unite our country!



My deep dark secret...

My fellow Americans, I did not vote for Barack Obama.

I voted for a man who has spent his entire life in service of his country.

He's earned the right not to have to explain the actions of those generations before him.


I hope that my great, great grandchildren don't ever have to explain mine.


But, as a child of military parents, it was so difficult for me to wholeheartedly back my party's nominee for president during this past election when there was another candidate who not only stood in service of our country as an elected official for over twenty years, but also served our country in time of war.

I have never supported the wars in the Middle East but I am fiercely supportive of our servicemen and women who are fighting for the freedom of so many and protecting our own.

My ex-husband still suffers from illness from the first Gulf War and my father was deployed for almost two years and that time was very difficult for my family. I was barely thirteen when he came home and shortly after that he was deployed again to the conflict in Somalia.

I was so angry!

"Why do we always have to police the rest of the world!? That's not your job!"

I'll never forget that afternoon as my father sat with me and my sister in a booth at a restaurant for lunch. My parents were in the middle of an ugly divorce and it was our afternoon with him.

I watched him as his face started to show the signs of age that I had never noticed before, and his shoulders dropped as he sighed heavily.

He then sat tall and determined - like the proud, dark, and handsome soldier I had always known.

It was at that moment that the father whose English I always teased, with his heavy Spanish accent, was as eloquent as any scholar whose words I'd ever hear...

"Dani, that flag that I wear on my shoulder that stands for the freedom that I help protect, doesn't just stand for you, but for everyone who can't fight for themselves. As long as I wear that uniform I will go where ever my Commander and Chief tells me to go, so that you don't ever have to witness the things that I have."


I am proud that our new First Lady's focus will be on the military family. Heaven knows that they are truly the unsung heroes of our country.

Their sacrifices are immeasurable so that we can sleep safe at night in a world where they shield us from nightmares we couldn't imagine are possible, so that we can dream all of life's possibilities.


My deep dark secret...

My fellow Americans, I did not vote for Barack Obama.

But he did indeed win the election and the hearts of our countrymen.

He is not our first African-American President.

He is our first TRULY AMERICAN PRESIDENT.

A man born from a white mother, an African father, raised in a multicultural home with an Indonesian stepfather and mother and later by the love of his grandparents while his mother worked abroad.

This man is a blending of cultures, races, and family dynamics. He understands the struggles of being unique and learning to overcome the diversity in his life.

What an amazing gift we have been given as a country.

A leader as diverse as the country he leads.


Now that the celebration of a new chapter in our nation's history is behind us, we watch as the President sets to tackle the many challenges that face our country.

I pray that our actions today, and in the next several years, bring pride and honor to the generations to come.

Art That Shaped My Life - Gone With the Wind

PREFACE
Sometimes while I'm working and have the television running in the background I'll surf through the channels and come across a television show or movie, sometimes a song that magically transports me to another place and time. It isn't the memories that come flooding back that have me so mesmerized as the realization that in some instances the moments spent watching or listening somehow have etched not just my memory but my personality, my passions, my dreams. Imagine that - how an art like music and "theater" can shape who a person becomes...

Gone With the Wind - in GERMAN - Come on, admit it - that's funny!

In the middle of fifth grade, while stationed in Fort Drum, Watertown, NY we received news that we were relocating to Stuttgart, Germany. I was attending my first Catholic School, Our Lady of Sacred Heart and was a frequent visitor to Sister Bernadette's office, our school principal. I was a dream of a student but had difficulty understanding and accepting how the world was created in seven days and topics of evolution and the time line of the dinosaurs would send my head into a tail spin. Sister Bernadette would just smile and listen to my ramblings as I played with the floppy gray rabbit in her office.

My memories of the school and my friends are happy ones. I think that's the time in my life that I dove into my "tom boyishness". I remember that Christmas, my mother volunteered to take me and a group of my all boy friends to the Salmon River Mall to find our teacher the perfect holiday gift from the monies we had collected in class. She was fond of pigs and we found her a particularly adorable stuffed pig that oinked and knew she'd love it! After our shopping spree we convinced my mother to let us watch Bill Murray's Scrooged that was in theaters that Christmas. Imagine my mother's horror as the opening scene showcased scantily clad Vegas-style dancers in full almost undress as the group of twelve year old boys and I giggled uncontrollably!

My last day in class was an emotional one as everyone cried and they presented me with cards and tokens of remembrance and a beautiful "We'll forever miss you, Dorana!" cake. I remember carefully gathering all of my precious mementos onto the bus and then on the walk home; my special New York treasures...

My parents had purchased a house while we lived in upstate New York and it was tucked away off of the main route on a winding dirt road. Our Spaniel/Beagle mix would run to meet me at the bus when he heard the wheels screech to a halt. It was a custom cedar siding house that had high ceilings and skylights. The first time I saw the house and the skylights I excitedly exclaimed,

"Daddy are you getting me a giraffe?"

Walking to the house that day I was filled with sadness, but somewhat relieved knowing that I wouldn't have to shovel the driveway of snow every afternoon after school in my uniform so that my parents could get their cars into the garage when they got home from work. I would develop huge welts all over my body from the extreme cold - the doctors said I was "allergic to the cold".

My father said "she's allergic to shoveling!"

I was still in awe over how school was never closed for a snow day! I definitely would not miss the tunnels of snow that would pile up in the winters.

As we awaited housing in Germany, we lived in an apartment above a bookstore in a little town in the Black Forest named Calw. My little sister would sing,

"I live in a cow, MOO MOO MOO! I live in a COW COW, MOO MOO MOO!"

It was something out of one of my fairy tale books; cobblestone roads, Tudor-style houses stacked line by line, beautiful bridges... And we lived smack in the middle of town across the street from the cathedral whose bells would ring every hour on the hour! Right in front of our building was a flowing water fountain which we would spend hours playing in that summer.

Our apartment... it was something right out of National Lampoon's European Vacation! It was a "two bedroom" where we shared the only toilet with the apartment next door, complete with an old fashioned skeleton key with a beautifully swirled handle and the doors had large keyholes you could see through. In the middle of the night when the young couple came home and you had to pee, you'd get caught walking through the hallway in your pajamas! Forgetting to check for available toilet paper before you sat on the pot was not an option!

The apartment had an open foyer with a corner booth-styled square table that led into the kitchen... Oh the KITCHEN - there was a complete floor to ceiling mural the entire span of the wall of an actual life-sized photo of a herd of deer in the woods!

After a party with friends, we came home one night to my father jumping into the air!

"Angie!" he yelled at my mother, "There's deer in the kitchen!"

I fell asleep that night in a fit of giggles!

Our shower was located in my parent's bedroom. Literally. In the MIDDLE of their bedroom! It was a standing shower completely surrounded in a square shower curtain contraption and my sister and I shared our space in the "living room" where we were ecstatic to find a pair of Murphy beds - beds that folded into the wall - that we slept on. Cleaning our "room" was a game of "how much can we throw into the wall and cover with our beds before it's no longer flush to the wall?" - game.

One morning I woke the house with screams as a man walked along the side of my window as if suspended in mid-air three stories above the ground,

"Morgan fraulien!" ...He was putting up a tent for smoked fish for a weekend festival!

The streets outside our apartment would transform every Saturday morning into an incredible farmer's market with fresh fruits and vegetables, produce, incredible fresh meats and this heavenly little tent that made fresh to order crepes with the most delectable sauces and toppings! My mouth waters with the memories of fresh curry wurst and brotchen, rotisserie chicken and the sweetest chocolates and cherries you can ever imagine right outside of the door every weekend!

My little sister and I had to wake up before dawn every morning to catch the first of two buses for school. We would run down the street, our heels clinking against the cobblestone as we ran up the stairs to the public bus, "Schnell! Schnell fraulien!" The bus drivers would wait for us each morning while the town commuters sneered at us for being late.

Lazy Sunday afternoons, we would curl up on my parent's bed and watch TV... without cable or any channels in English. We would surf through the channels looking for something to watch and would always settle on Spartacus, the mini series North and South, and of course Gone With the Wind... in GERMAN!

My sister and I would sit there mesmerized by the wonderful costumes and sets and be taken away to another time and world history as my mother would tell her version of the stories and about when she first saw them.

I'd then rush to the library that week to borrow the books and learn the scripts so that I could create my own translations when we'd catch the movies on TV again that weekend!

I fell in love with history and theater that summer... and now when I catch glimpses of those movies, I'm whisked away to that fairy tale cobble stoned town where we were magically immersed into another time; where the church bells sung me to sleep every night and townsmen floated outside my third-story windows!

Art That Shaped My Life - The Little Mermaid

I remember the summer that the movie came out on video. I was twelve and I recall throwing a tantrum at the Post Exchange video department trying to get my father to buy it for me! It was that remarkable time in my life where I was nearing the end of my age of innocence.

Ask any military brat and there is always a time, a place, where their life seems to stand still. A time when they recall their family being a real family. A time that was marked by happiness and the first resemblance of stability and normalcy; where real friendships blossomed for the first time. A time when you weren't just that new kid in school.

That time for me was in Pattonville, Germany; a little Army community in the town of Ludwigsburg.

The movie of that segment in my life - Disney's The Little Mermaid.

It makes me laugh to see the name on the screen as I type it! I am NOT the girly-girl type. My girlfriends and I in middle school were the "tom boys." Finding us in dresses was a difficult task even during school dances! We were smart and fiercely independent! Our dress code was predominantly jeans, sneakers and whatever we could steal out of our dad's closets and we never wore anything that revealed our already matured curves.

I wanted to be an aeronautics engineer and my best friend wanted to be the first woman to jump into a black hole! We had our whole academic careers planned out at twelve. Our handwriting was almost exactly alike and we would duplicate our homework for the classes we were good at and just swap them out in the morning before class for one another instead of wasting time on homework for every subject in school; both straight A's and never missed a day of class. ...well, almost.

Our school projects were always due on Monday and we always had the best of intentions to finish them over the weekend during our weekend overnights - projects of course that had been scheduled sometimes months earlier that we had never really started. Mondays would come and we would beg our parents to let us stay home to finish the projects that never seemed to be completed on time. We would always get stern reactions, but my mother always called in sick to work, herded us into the kitchen where we would prop ourselves onto the kitchen counters as my mother made us fried rice for lunch as we recited The Little Mermaid from the opening song to the finishing credits. My father would pop in from lunch knowing his girls were home from school where he would crack the whip at our procrastination, endlessly tease my best friend, eat the brownies we made earlier in the morning and make us both promise not to turn another project in late again!

And we didn't. That fall everything changed in our little perfect community. Our service member parents got orders to deploy to Operation Desert Shield. Those lazy care-free days of reciting movies and singing songs gave way to opening packages of funny money and desert head wraps. The deployments lasted almost two years and nothing was ever really the same again; I was never the same again.

Deployments are tough on military marriages and families - young teens.

Shortly after my father came home from Kuwait, his whole unit got stationed in Fort Benning, Columbus, Georgia.

The time my father was away and our move away from our little world in Pattonville changed my life forever in so many ways; but it was nice to move as a group this time around. A lot of my father's colleagues purchased homes in the same neighborhood and it was nice to have familiar friends and a small support system during the change to a new environment.

That first year in Columbus was a difficult one. It had been many years since I had been enrolled in a public school. I remember the day that I walked into the first of several schools I attended in Columbus. Everything seemed like a normal day until I walked into the lunch room. It was at that point that I was exposed to a social phenomenon I had only read about in books and watched on TV.

I was shocked to see that the lunch room was completely split down the middle in tables where the white students were on one side and the black were on the other. I remember standing there in total shock and then panic as I surveyed the room trying to understand what I was seeing.

Growing up on Army installations we were always exposed to so many diverse cultures, races, and languages, that segregation was a foreign concept. I realized that just like any society we also created social groups but instead of by race or color, we created groups based on interests primarily music! Although the music "segregation" were often against color lines, there were always large numbers of white kids who hung out with the "rappers" and black kids who ran with the "metal" kids. Perhaps the most intriguing part of it all was that in the big scheme of things besides the relative minority of kids in those music groups, the other social groups throughout school looked like something right out of an After School Special - groups based on interests, not on color.

My immediate group of closest friends in middle school in Germany were a rainbow of stunning girls from vastly different cultures. A soft-spoken exotic island beauty with long flowing dark hair and fair skin from Guam, a firey red head with vibrant striking green eyes and fair skinned Mexican - explain that one - a tall, boisterous, athletic Italian brunette, and the most popular girl in school, a full-figured black girl - fiercely loyal!

And there I was in the middle of this lunch room in a panic trying to figure out which one of these black and white two worlds I would belong... Right before I felt myself turn away into a river of tears, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it. My Table. The melting pot of children in the sea of white and black. I walked towards it as they all looked up with smiles on their faces understanding my hesitant glance in their direction. As I sat down they all took turns introducing themselves, first their names and secondly their last known address... the Army Brat insignia...

My first year in Columbus ended like it began, saying goodbye to those that I had grown to love.

On the last night before my closest new friend's family was leaving to their new duty station in Alaska we stayed up late watching The Little Mermaid. My memories of that night are so different than watching the movie just a couple of years earlier and reciting it in the kitchen as my mom made us lunch while we played hookie from school...

This time I sat in my parent's family room, in the arms of a boy who had been my closest friend during that difficult year. I remember the pain of watching him go, having to say good bye again. But this time is was somehow different. The feelings were different. That first innocent love. The kind that grows from knowing someone before you really know yourself. We sat there that night, next to one another, barely breathing as our hands lightly touched and we listened to Ariel praying

What would I give
To live where you are?
What would I pay
To stay here beside you?
What would I do to see you
Smiling at me?

And everytime I catch a glimpse of Ariel's new cartoon on TV or the giant billboard in Time Square advertising the new show on Broadway I'm taken back on a swirling roller coaster of emotions of friendship, family, lost, and first love...

Who says an animated feature is just child's play...