Kids and the Obama election

We all know that the election of Obama will our lives. We will finally have a Democrat in the white House after eight years of an idiot in the White House. Obama has talked about changing out lives in many other ways too, changing No child Left Behind, higher tax refunds to the middle class and healthcare reform. But isn't it our children who will benefit the most from seeing Obama become elected. Children of all races will realize that you can aspire to become the President of the USA. You do not have to be a white male to become president. I know we have yet to elect a female president, but I am hopeful that the really good run that Hillary Clinton had combined with the fact that we have now elected an African-American man will allow us to elect a women in the very near future, hopefully 8 years from now, as long as it isn't Palin. I started to think about this after seeing this article in the Sun-Times. It discusses how at the school that Michelle Obama attended for a time, the whole school has begun to integrate the Obama election into all of the subjects from math to Social Studies to Language Arts. Furthermore, the teachers and principal have started to use the fact that Obama is now our president and looks like many of these children (it is a predominantly African-American school) to inspire these children to reach for higher goals. The principal has even asked children, when they misbehave, "How do you think Barak Obama would feel about this?" These children are seeing that their dreams are able to come true and that if they want to be president, it is now a possibility and not just a dream.

There was a further article that discussed at Bouchet Math and Science Academy in Chicago, the same school mentioned above, the ideas of what Obama should do first now that he is elected. Many of the children had great ideas ranging from stopping people from taking drugs or selling drugs to improving our educational system to getting the troops out of Iraq. These children are the future, they will take over this country when my generation is gone. Many of these children will be able to vote in eight years, so the hope I have is that they will have seen someone who governed this country and left it in better shape they he started with as opposed to our current president who is leaving the country in worse shape than when he started.

As amazing an accomplishment as the election of an African-American president is to those of you who lived through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, I was not even born yet, I think it is even more important to those children who will not have really known of a country that had not elected an African-American president. These children will grow up to want to be president and we will no longer telling minority children that they will be the first non-white president or that they can be anything they want even though they have no role models, now they have that role model. This was an important election for the whole country, but for our children it was possibly the most important one for their lives.