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Kelly Thompson is currently working on a memoir, the story of one woman's journey of single teenage motherhood and out of her family's fundamentalist cult. Persistence in the face of poverty, silence, and erasure ends in identity and power for the narrator and her descendants. Kelly's work has been published or anthologized in BOMB, LARB, VIDA Review, Guernica, Electric Literature, Entropy, Fatal Flaw, Oh Comely, The Rattling Wall, Dove Tales, The Rumpus, Proximity, The Writing Disorder, Witchcraft, Manifest Station, 49 Writers, Coachella Review, Lady Liberty Lit, and other literary journals. She is also the curator for the highly regarded 'Voices on Addiction' column at The Rumpus. Kelly lives in Denver, Colorado in the sunshine of the spirit. You can follow her on Twitter @stareenite.

Point of View

Point of View
and if you wanted to drown you could, but you don’t...~David Whyte

Friday, October 31, 2008

Heil Obama?

I have received two emails in recent days warning that Barack Obama is the new Hitler. One was couched as a personal email from a survivor of Nazi Germany; the most recent quotes Fouad Ajami, with an emphasis on his Arab-American ethnicity, as a source for why Obama is to be feared.
These are indeed difficult and exciting times: difficult in part because information is irresponsibly dessiminated on the internet and elsewhere - responsible journalism seems to be a thing of the past - exciting because information can be dessiminated by anyone, from anywhere, all over the globe via the internet. Free speech and true democracy is accessible through the electronic gateway and, as long as the information continues to freely zoom along the internet highway, any Joe Blow (or should I say any Joe Plumber?) may join in the fray of public discourse, such as it be.
It is my choice to post a link via this article to Fauad Ajami's incendiary commentary because, in light of my enthusiastic endorsement of Obama, I to want provide readers with some of the misinformation that is circulating via the internet and email.
The only answer I have to a discourse like Ajami's is to point readers in the direction of Barack Obama's book, "The Audacity of Hope" as another source of information; in my mind, a better source of information for those who truly want to get to know the man, Barack Obama.
Fear appears to be the weapon of choice among Obama detractors. It is a corrosive, debilitating tool - it steals into the hearts of the most honest, sincere and authentic among us. It plants it's seeds of discord and moves on. Witnessing its clever disguises, my heart is heavy. My heart is sad. I am afraid for us all.

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