Obama, Hurricane Sandy, avenge America’s pain

So the Lord chose the son of an African father and a European mother to avenge that pain and carry America to a promised land...

Dear Tingasiga:
Barack Obama has avenged America’s pain of the last 400 years. He has done it, not for himself, not for his family, not for African Americans, but for all of the Americans.
The contest between Obama and Mitt Romney was not about the different visions the two men had on America’s daunting social and economic challenges.

The contest was not about which man offered a better foreign policy. Obviously Obama had restored America’s place of honour in the international community.

The contest was not about which man would make a better commander in chief of the world’s most formidable armed forces. Obama had ended the war in Iraq and had managed the war in Afghanistan and against terrorism way better than his Republican predecessor had done.

Obama’s central role in the war against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi had avenged the lives of many Americans who had died at the hands of terrorists that the Brother Leader had sponsored in the 1970s and 1980s.

Obama had killed Osama bin Laden, America’s enemy number one who had wrought fire and destruction on the lives, the buildings and, most importantly, the American psyche that had been pulverised in the flames of 9/11.

In most civilised nations, the man who ordered the killing of bin Laden would have been declared a conquering hero by his grateful nation. In short, Obama’s re-election to a second-term ought to have been a given, except for one thing. He was an African American. Yes, the contest was about race. It was a contest between history and the future of the USA.

Obama’s virulent opponents - The Tea Party, the Citizens United, the Birthers and so on - were driven by the pain of watching an African American sitting in a chair that had been occupied by some of the most revered European Americans of the last 200 years.
It was a contest between a past when the master and the slave knew their respective places, and a present and future where millions of Americans had embraced Martin Luther King Junior’s dream of a nation of racial equality.

Obama’s re-lection has shown, once again, that he is at the head of a new generation of Americans of all races that have vanquished the folly of apartheid and slavery. The ground troops who worked tirelessly to get him re-elected were predominantly European-American.

While it is true that he was the choice of the vast majority of the minority voters, he would never have won without the votes of tens of millions of liberated European-Americans.

The pain of America’s 400 years of slavery, apartheid and racial injustice has afflicted both the European and the African citizens of that nation. So the Lord chose the son of an African father and a European mother to avenge that pain and carry America to a promised land that was so eloquently described by Martin Luther King Jr. when Obama was only two years old.

Back in 1963, King dreamed of a day when “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”
He dreamed of a day when his children would “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Obama’s triumph is part of the realisation of King’s dream. Yet he almost blew it with his lacklustre performance in the first debate with Romney. All of a sudden, a Romney presidency was no longer a distant dream.

But the Lord’s work through Obama was not yet done. And so out of the giant ocean upon which millions of slaves had been brought to America came a hurricane that would redeem Obama’s fortunes. No it was not sent by Kenyan magicians. It was the Lord at work.
Hurricane Sandy hit America days before the election, propelled by the fury of the ghosts of millions of slaves who had perished in the Middle Passage over the centuries of slave terror.

It was a horrific storm that claimed lives of Americans and destroyed property across the Eastern coast of the USA. But like the storms that nearly killed the Apostle Paul near Crete (Acts 27: 13-44) and John Newton (the writer of Amazing Grace) in the North Atlantic, the Lord was working His purpose out. The racists would not reverse the gains of recent decades. Hurricane Sandy would see to that.

Obama, the steady hand in the White House, the man who had kept America safe for four years, was now in charge, bringing relief to the storm ravaged communities, receiving the endorsement of a Republican governor of New Jersey, reassuring the country that they were safer with him than with his opponent whose beliefs were akin to the colour of a chameleon.

Hurricane Sunday sealed the deal. Obama would be re-elected, cheered on by millions of Europeans, Africans, Latinos, and Asians, to avenge the pain that all of them had suffered. We pray for him and his great country.