Looking Forward To The Next 4 Years

  

The election is over and Barack Obama came through with a comfortable win over the overly confident multi-millionaire, Mitt Romney. Two months later, The Republicans are still licking their wounds, clinging to denial and trying to get it together for 2016. They seem to not accept the changing demographics across this country with regard to women, the middle class, the poor, immigrants and the all-talked about Latino vote. 
 
As for the Democrats and the Black vote, there's also a sort of denial or unwillingness for Black America to accept that although we are the most loyal demographic within the Democrtic Party, we are the most overlooked and taken for granted. To be honest, I had some problems with President Obama's ignoring the specific plight of African Americans in his first term, even though I understand where that came from. I get it, I realize he had to straddle the political/racial fence and not appear too willing to place racial preference in policy and scare everyone else that he was Black America's President and not the President for the whole nation. Basically, he had to quell any fears that he might be giving us some undue public policy advantages because we belong to the same group. 

But how about the fact that over 90% of the Black vote went to him and we deserve some policy attentions for helping to put him in office. The LGBT community, Latinos and women all gained some policies that addressed their needs in response to their votes that helped get him in office. He didn't just do some token gestures to placate them, he created sound, long-term policies that will support their respective agendas and concerns as they move forward into the next generation. So my question is: What did we get other than a lecture about fatherhood and how we should stop complaining and take off our house slippers and get to work? Not much.  He never addressed the prison industrial complex, stop and frisk police practices, black business formation and the loss of homes in the foreclosure debacle through predatory lending (see Wells Fargo). We got told, "A rising tide raises all boats". If so, how come we're always at the bottom of the ship. I don't pretend to feel the President can repair all the problems that affect Black America but we are owed some policies that address our specific needs and we need to be aggressive, in his second term, in demanding attention be paid to our agenda as his constituents and not his racial brothers and sisters.
We'll need to be politically mature now more than ever.  I'm not willing to go the route of Tavis Smiley or Cornell West, but attention and action needs to happen from us and for us.  There's way too much poverty that is so accepted in our community, and it doesn't really matter what city you travel to, it always looks just about the same.  I travel and look at our situation and have to wonder just how has having a Black President actually benefitted our condition on the whole. 

I would be happy if Obama actually starts talking about the poor.  Just getting the topic on the radar is a start since there hasn't been any real policy to attack poverty since the Johnson administration.   Poverty, that bad word nobody uses anymore because "the middle class" sounds more paletable to Middle America, but little do they realize they are slowing becoming today's poor.