I’ve been sick enough the last few days to stay at home for probably the first time in 10 years or so. I’ve watched the news, read the Atlanta paper (ugh), read chapters in bad novels, checked email, dozed –- and repeated that sequence over and over. So, I wasn’t at all surprised to find myself wide-awake at 2:00 this morning. 

I’m a little bit of a political junkie and what my thoughts drifted toward are the enormous changes taken place since that late summer day in 1960 when my parents took me to the Cleveland airport to send me off to college. They took me to the gate, put me on an airplane (my first-ever flight), and wished me well on my flight to New Orleans — with a refueling stop in Atlanta, of course.

Upon landing at Moisant Field (now Louis Armstrong) I wasn’t at all prepared to see what I saw. Segregation was an abstract term to me until that day. Separate drinking fountains. Separate bathrooms. Separate sitting areas. Disrespect. 

Flash forward 48 years and we have an African-American President-elect who was born a year after I started at Tulane. Do we have a perfect country? No. Can we get better? Yes. Will we get better? Yes we can.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 11:28 am and is filed under Miscellaneous.