Our New President

            I am very happy to see our new president finally take the office we elected him to serve in. It is wonderful that the United States of America is in a country where regime change happens with a celebration instead of a coup. In this particular instance it has been time for a change for too long already. I do not envy him the job because of the growing worldwide economic crisis, the ongoing wars that are raging, the threat of terrorism by many extremist groups, and the long overdue modernizations of social and scientific rules and regulations he must make.

I am very happy to see Mr. Obama in office. It is refreshing to see a man with a beautiful wife and a young family in the Oval Office. I personally believe that a person who has small children is more likely to care about the future of the country than a person who has begun to be jaded by the generally unrewarding experience of raising teenagers. The same goes for geriatric men who do not have a long time left to live, and have progressed well beyond their prime. It just makes sense to me that the leader of this planet’s most powerful and dangerous country should possess a strong drive to make the world a better place for everybody, not just some special interest group or other.

I must also admit that I have supported Mr. Obama from early on in the primaries, and in fact was a delegate for him to our county convention. Normally I have avoided politics in general as there are a lot of relatively unsavory individuals involved, most of whom I find to be, well, politicians. You know what I mean, slippery, repugnant people who milk the system for everything they can personally gain while telling lies out of both sides of their mouths. This time, however, it seemed to me, a middle aged Caucasian man, that it was important to work for change in our failing system, so I did.

This brings to mind another point that people do not seem to consider. Everybody keeps talking about America having its first black president, but that is not really true. As a biologist I have to point out that Mr. Obama had a Caucasian mother and an African father. What this means, from a genetic standpoint, is that while 50% of the DNA located in the nucleus of his cells came from each parent, 100% of the his mitochondrial DNA came from his mother. So, genetically speaking, he is slightly more Caucasian than African.

I have to point out that race is a biologically meaningless concept. There is more genetic variation within the races than there is between them. Race should hopefully become a dead issue soon, as it is a ridiculous artificial schism that humanity does not need to have. When we finally come together as humans, as opposed to ‘insert group here’ versus ‘insert group here’, we will be able to build a better world, and possibly even learn to live in peace with one another. Mr. Obama is the first president of mixed race, certainly, but to call him a black president is very inaccurate. Mr. Obama is an American president, and to me represents the idea of the melting pot that America once prided itself for being, before the Orwellian idea of political correctness came into being. I am proud that he is in office, I think that he will be the best president we have had in decades, and I wish him the very best. He has a daunting task before him. Fortunately he is also the best man available to do the job that needs to be done.