OK – Good Looks Aside…
Because I am a relationships coach, I had to liken this situation of Obama’s cabinet appointments Monday to a matter near and dear to my heart. The issue is trust. So often women are afraid to trust men. We may give lip service to the idea of trust, but when it comes right down to it, in our heart of hearts, we are leery of trusting men.
We prove it every day. We say we trust him, yet micro manage his choices and actions. We believe that we have entrusted him with our very lives, but we question his choices, renege on supporting his choices (if we don’t like them) and scrutinize his every move. Shameful.
Barack Obama has run the most intelligent campaign ever. He not only defeated the Clinton machine, but he raised the most money, rallied the most diversity, and seemed to reinvigorate the entire planet! Yes? He did it from a centered, calm, resolute space of spirit. He did not need to resort to cyber violence or force. He accomplished his mission because he has the mental and spiritual fortitude to lead. Isn’t it time that we trust him?
White House Butler
CLARK, The Washington Post
Eugene Allen, 89, a retired White House butler, tries on his old tuxedo for a photo. Allen, who served eight presidents during a period when America’s racial history was being rewritten, is marveling at the election of Barack Obama. Now retired, he started when blacks were in the kitchen. By Wil Haygood
November 7, 2008
Reporting from Washington — For more than three decades, Eugene Allen worked in the White House, a black man unknown to the headlines. During some of those years, harsh segregation laws lay upon the land.
He trekked home every night to his wife, Helene, who kept him out of her kitchen. At the White House, he worked closer to the dirty dishes than to the Oval Office. Helene didn’t care; she just beamed with pride.
President Truman called him Gene. President Ford liked to talk golf with him. He saw eight presidential administrations come and go, often working six days a week.
“I never missed a day of work,” Allen said. He was there while racial history was made: Brown vs. Board of Education, the Little Rock school crisis, the 1963 March on Washington, the cities burning, the civil rights bills, the assassinations.
When he started at the White House in 1952, he couldn’t even use the public restrooms when he ventured back to his native Virginia. “We had never had anything,” Allen, 89, recalled of black America at the time. “I was always hoping things would get better.”
In its long history, the White House — note the name — has had a complex and vexing relationship with black Americans.
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