Monthly Archive for November, 2008

Late Tuesday night, or maybe Wednesday morning, my wife made the following observation – when the history books look back on the last few months of 2008 they will no doubt record the beginning of the end of the era of White Male Control. From the meltdown on Wall Street to the election of Barack Obama, White Men are being pushed out of positions of power.

In an earlier time, white privilege (and let’s not be shy, that’s exactly what it is) meant that the men and women who wrecked the economy through their greed (or incompetence) maintained their positions in the halls of Wall Street. But not this time. Although a new financial marketplace is yet to emerge, one can reasonably hope that it will reward value over greed and merit over the old-boys network.

In the political sphere, millions of Americans ignored the side-show, put aside the fearmongering and voted for a strong break with the past.

Of course it’s not all sunshine and roses, yet. Witness the combination of corporate media and old-boy politics that put an end to Darcy Burner’s run for the House of Representatives. The old monsters can still rear their ugly heads and they still have a lot of power.

But there are a lot of us and there are more of us then there are of them. And we have our laptops, our camera phones and our flip cams. And we have our networks, lots of networks. And we’ll be watching.

Profound Thought Number Two: We Americans don’t always do the right thing (slavery, interment of the Japanese, extermination of the native Americans) but when we do (defeat of Fascism, Nazism and Communism, landing on the Moon, the Internet) we do hit it out of the park.