Hey all! In honor of the weekend and the fun that I’m sure that all of us should have on deck for our Friday and Saturday night I think I’m well within my right to ask, “why the hell so many of y’all got your draws on so tight?”

There is a growing sect of new millennium pseudo-intellectuals that would have you believe nothing in the world is smile worthy, nothing is fair, and nothing in the world can be taken with too grave an attitude. You know the people I’m talking about. They can usually be found playing the role of Buzz Killington sending the latest bad news from their favorite news outlet to your email or Facebook feed. They hang out in spots where the coffee is strong and the whispered conspiracy theories fly on the wings of Eagles over muffins and magazines. They can give you a million reasons why life is bad and none on why it’s good.

Now, is life jacked up, right now? Absolutely! The job market is terrible, the economy is still trying to find the bottom, houses aren’t worth what they were when your Ryder truck initially pulled up in front of it, and a lot of people that need to get to a doctor can’t because they simply can’t afford to. All of this is true and has been for a very long time. Isn’t that quite enough to worry about, given you’re not in the 5-10% of America that doesn’t have to worry about such all or even one of these matters, without people counting out the number of times that a news outlet says Obama without putting “President” in front of it?

Hey, I dig the President too; I think it’s cool that a Black man can rise to the highest office in the land and at the same time raise the blood pressure of north Georgia racists everywhere. However, is he any less the President if someone doesn’t say “President Obama”? If a reporter just says “Obama” in a news article does that mean he won’t go to sleep at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that night? Hell, I doubt if any Black man, living or dead, has ever been called a n****r more times than he has in 2.5 scant years, and he’s only HALF black, does it mean that he can’t sign a piece of paper and make sh*t happen anyway? Sure doesn’t.

However, the ownership and defense of the President has reached gargantuan levels. I was watching the State of the Union address a few weeks back with some friends of mine and someone in the room said matter of factly, “Hey, go to your Facebook page and count how many times someone in your feed has said ‘My President’”. I got 12; the high number in the room was 17. A little known fact is that he’s everyone’s President; whether they voted for him or not, whether they think he’s a citizen or not, whether they think he’s a Muslim or not; he’s still the bad MF’er stepping off that helicopter on the South Lawn with access to “The Button” should something dire jump off. Oh and whether you liked it or not back a few years ago, Bush was your President too…and his father before him…whether you liked it or not.

“Why they keep talking about the First Lady’s arms being out? Why are they disrespecting the First Lady? They didn’t address her as First Lady Michelle Obama!” *sigh* First of all to that first question, I can’t think of a prior First Lady’s arms that I would have wanted to see flapping in the DC breeze. Now, let’s have a pop quiz conversation here.

Me: See that brown skinned lady standing next to the Leader of the Free World?

Random Somebody Else: Yeah.

Me: Yeah. What’s her name?

Random Somebody Else: Michelle Obama

Me: Yeah? But who is she?

Random Somebody Else: Idiot! She’s the First Lady!

Me: Yeah.

Random Somebody Else: She’s pretty hot, right?

Me: Damn straight.

Again, you can call her Mrs. Obama, you can call her Michelle, you can call her Shelly, you can call her M.O., you can call her Obama’s Baby Mama or anything else but it doesn’t change who and what she is and quite frankly I think that a lot of you are taking it harder than she ever will because at the end of the day when she goes to bed she’s doing so with the man holding “The Button” and, in my opinion, that makes her First Lady like a MF’er.

Look, do people give the President a hard time? Absolutely! The man is President during one of the most trying times in U.S. history aside from that built in and integral reason that people choose to hate the man (Anyone? Bueller?). Every President has been disrespected, hell, didn’t some cat throw a pair of wing tips at Bush while he was giving a speech, but none quite as much as the current, especially in such a concentrated amount of  time in office. But shouldn’t he be able to bear that; a man of color in a country that has a pretty solid track record of being unkind to darker shades of humanity? And while disrespecting the office and the man that holds it should be considered less than American, I don’t think that there’s anyone more equipped to handle that disrespect than a man who shares the skin tone of a people subjected to slavery, segregation and second-class citizenship. It takes strong shoulders to bear weight of a nation, even stronger ones to build one. But people tend to lose themselves in titles and perception completely forgetting that at the end of the day that, really, none of that matters.

So in regards to Obama’s title, to quote that great Negro poet Wiz Khalifa, “You know what it is!” So does he, so does his opponents, and its still “President”. So, for goodness sake, stop worrying about it and cluttering my Facebook feed with that mess.

~thanks for reading 🙂

About the author:  Skrap is a moderate who hates politics and the people that take politics/politicians too seriously. He doesn’t watch CNN or Fox News and won’t pretentiously pretend to be in the know. He lives alone with his flat screen TV, Playstation3 and a bouquet of helium balloons from his birthday in December that still haven’t deflated.

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