Monday evening I received an email informing me President Barack Obama would be making a stop here at N.C . State on his tour to talk about his newly unveiled American Jobs Act. It wasn’t long after this notice was sent out that a mixed bag of comments began to find their way into my news feed on Facebook.
Some of these comments were positive, like people saying that they were so excited for the opportunity to hear the president they were going to sleep on bricks all night to make sure that they would get their golden ticket. Of course, not all comments were ones of joy. I didn’t expect everyone to be excited about his appearance. Some people aren’t interested in politics and some people don’t approve of the job Obama has done. I also expected a fair number of people to make ridiculous and outlandish statements about how Obama is out to ruin America with his radical policies. I was not let down in this regard in the least.
The negative comments just last night ranged from things like, “Stay away from school Obama, we already have enough money problems” to “he is a sociopath and needs to be put down.” The negativity did not end there. This morning while I waited in line for my ticket I heard a handful of people say things about how everybody in the line wasn’t a true American or how they would never wait in line to watch someone as detrimental to the American way of life as Obama has been.
These are comments that come from my friends, my peers, my fellow Americans. It infuriates me that people who call themselves patriots have the audacity to show such disrespect for a man of such power. A man who has devoted his life to doing what he can to help the American people and protect the freedoms they enjoy. It doesn’t matter if you do not agree with Obama’s politics; he is the president of the United States of America and that is a position that deserves some respect.
This habit of disrespecting the president is not new. The angst and hate demonstrated by democrats during Bush’s eight-year reign is still fresh in my mind. As a democrat, I hold those people in contempt for not showing that they are just as weak and just as easy to anger as my peers now who are spewing uninformed hate from their mouths. I did not agree with most of the policies Bush pushed to be passed but what I didn’t do was go out and try to tear down his character and insult his intelligence. I didn’t call him a fascist or say that the Patriot Act was Bush wanting to make America a police state.
What I did was respect him. I knew that, as the president, he was doing what he thought was best at the time and even though I did not think his plan would work, I did not hope that it failed because if the president fails, the country fails.
The lack of respect my peers have shown is absolutely abominable. If they were really the Americans they claimed to be, they would lend an ear to the president. They would listen to what he has to say and if they disagreed they wouldn’t call him a socialist, communist, or radical Islamist. Saying those things does nothing to fix the situation; a true American patriot would show him the respect he deserves and voice their thoughts through their representatives. So if you are planning on missing Obama’s speech today because you don’t like him, shame on you. As American citizens and residents you owe him the respect to give him a few hours of your time on this special occasion to hear what he has to say.
