What I'm Reading (October 8, 2009)

Airlift to America: How Barack Obama Sr., John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya and 800 East African Students Changed Their world and Ours by Tom Schachtman

To refresh your memories, the Tom Mboya Airlift is the endeavor that brought Barack Obama Senior and hundreds of other young Kenyans to America to be given Western higher education and to return to their home and be prepared to lead their nation in the wake of its independence from the United Kingdom.

Before you curse the day that fate brought Barack Obama Sr. to America, don't forget that if the Airlift hadn't occurred, I wouldn't exist either.

One of the many disconcerting facts that I've run across since discovering the existence of Barack Obama Jr. is how much the students of the Mboya airlift were nurtured and supported by prominent individuals of the hard Left of that era and this one--Cora Weiss of the Institute for Policy Studies and entertainer Harry Belafonte, to give a pair of seemingly divergent examples.

When I mentioned this to my mother, she said "oh yes, Roosevelt [University, Chicago where my parents met] was crawling with Communists back then."  Mom never quite saw the attraction of Leftism, lucky blessedly for me and my siblings.

However, one can't imagine how eerie it is to feel as though your existence was engineered by someone other than God and one's parents.

Comments

[Punditarian]

This reader thanks God and your parents for you and your writings. No one else.

[Kwongdzu]

You are the beauty that is America, Juliette!

[Kwongdzu]

Ok, that came of sounding weird. What I meant is that this is a place where people from unusual backgrounds are thrown together and the mix can be surprising. Rather than look at it as your existence being engineered by someone other than God or your parents, look to the fact that if the engineering experiment was intended to produce communists, it went seriously awry where your parents are involved. I don't see how that can NOT be an act of God :) .