President Obama has proven time and again over the past eight years that he is a consummate leader. If his interview in The New Yorker is any indication, he’s also an amazing father.
‘People Are Complicated’
David Remnick’s piece for the November 28 edition of The New Yorker is an incredible look into how Obama, along with the White House staff, handled the results of the election. Like most of us, they, too, expected to be welcoming an experienced politician into the presidency on January 20.
Of course, things didn’t quite turn out that way.
Since the election, the rash of hate crimes that has swept over the nation — more than 700 verifiable and reported crimes as of this writing, according to the Southern Policy Law Center — is devastating. Part of parenthood is trying to explain these things to our children. Even if, like Sasha and Malia Obama, those children are young adults.
Remnick asked Obama what he said to his daughters about the election and the hate crimes. Obama replied:
“What I say to them is that people are complicated. Societies and cultures are really complicated. . . . This is not mathematics; this is biology and chemistry. These are living organisms, and it’s messy. And your job as a citizen and as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding. And you should anticipate that at any given moment there’s going to be flare-ups of bigotry that you may have to confront, or may be inside you and you have to vanquish. And it doesn’t stop. . . . You don’t get into a fetal position about it. You don’t start worrying about apocalypse. You say, O.K., where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward.”
Wise words.
We’re going to miss you, sir.
Read the entire piece, entitled (in the online version) “Obama Reckons With A Trump Presidency,” here.
Featured Image by Pete Souza via Flickr/U.S. Gov’t Works
