I have been hesitant to say very much on this ever since I was called a big ol' racist for saying that there are t-shirts being sold in Georgia with Obama as Curious George.

I said it to point out the way the tide is about to turn as the racists get desperate and less cautious in their invective.

Since there has been a well received humorous post about his ears, I can come clean. 

The republican party is about to lose its religion. 

They are tanking on the one thing they are thought to do right: money.  Republicans were always the rich fatcats and the Democrats were the ones who were all about causes and social justice.  Well, they screwed the pooch with their greed and the game just changed.

Also, they have a nice white lady to do the dirty work for them now.  And it always sounds a little less awful coming from a nice white lady, doesn't it?

Not for me. 

I live in the south and deal with this every day and have to allow for the age of the people I am listening to and categorize them as dinosaurs for whose deaths I am waiting with the patience built into a southern woman. 

There is a LOT we tolerate in order to keep peace in the south. 

For us, the racism is everyday happenings.  For the northerners, it seems, the racism is a radical event that smacks you in the face every once in a while because it is so extreme.

It isn't extreme here.  It is normal.  Awful, but normal.  We deal with it.  We try not to make every family event a sparring match between the holdouts and the evolved.  And so we smile and nod, sometimes grimace and nod.

I draw the line with my kid.  "N" out of your mouth around my kid means that you will not be around my kid much without me right there to give you a dirty look if I catch you going there.

It is like a line in the sand saying, "OK, I will try for us to all just get along, but it stops with this generation. He will not hear "N" spouted off as if it is the Webster's correct term for black people."

But you can't fight all day every day.  You have to live.  That is us all just getting along.

Obama will not fix the dirty south.

Obama will make it worse.  He will start firestorms of the last vestiges of grotesque racism.  The KKK will re-emerge.  Skinheads will spearhead that movement.  Crackers will be too chickenshit to do it out in public like the skinheads, but they will buy their poison online and redistribute it.  They will tell new more evil jokes as they grill and skin their kills.  Obama will be fodder upon whom every social ill will be blamed.  It will not be his fault, but the south, like Iraq, was broken a long time ago and nobody ever fixed it.  It is still broken.  There are a lot of strong analogies between racial division in the south and in Iraq.  But I am not going there at this time.  It is not the time to compare blacks and whites to variegated muslims.  Do you see how living in the south has taught me when to just shut up and wait for a better time?  That is what southern women do by direct example. 

It will not be fun time in the country.  I will stay home a lot.

I know, I live here.  I have lived here my whole life.  I have been on the front lines of social integration.  I know who I live among.  And I know who my friends are.  I don't have a lot of friends that I spend real time with.  Blacks in the south generally self-segregate and I am white; and whites don't like it when I don't tolerate their tacit racism.  So I spend a lot of time with a very close and small circle of friends.

And even among them we don't talk about race.  It just makes us angry.  Maybe this time, the new south will rise up and stop this.  Maybe Obama can be a rallying force, but the true change will have to happen from within.