With the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States, a disturbing question has appeared on various discussion groups on the internet. It asks, “Will they shoot Obama?
It didn’t surprise me that people would raise that possibility, because the authorities have already foiled attempts on his life. The ongoing discussion generated by the question indicates that many people find the idea of shooting the president-elect appalling, while a few find it appealing. But on the positive side, the fact that Americans elected an Afro-American to their highest office suggests they may have made a significant departure in the way they make major decisions. Maybe they will finally put away their guns.
Although they consider themselves the world’s leading democratic nation, a look back in time tells a different story. They have made major decisions throughout their history by preferring bullets to the ballot box. When they wanted independence from Britain they loaded their muskets and went to war with the mother country. Although they argue that circumstances left them no other choice, Canadian and Australian history shows us that other countries moved toward independence without littering the landscape with human corpses. I believe that their genesis at the point of a gun has conditioned Americans to reach for bullets rather than ballots when they wish to make critical decisions or settle differences.
The U.S. Declaration of Independence says: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable [inalienable] Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
Although amendments to the constitution further supported the idea of individual freedom, slavery remained an accepted part of their culture for years. After Great Britain and Canada had outlawed the practice by legislative means, the Americans chose a different route: When they couldn’t agree on freeing slaves they took up arms (a right guaranteed them in a constitutional amendment) and turned them on their fellow countrymen. And just to cap off that sad episode, a dissenting citizen unhappy with the way President Abraham Lincoln ran the country, used a bullet to remove him from office.
Dissenting Americans have punctuated their history with multiple tries on the lives of their presidents; assassins have made 17 attempts to kill sitting presidents, former presidents, and presidents-elect. Four attempts on sitting presidents succeeded: Abraham Lincoln (the 16th president), James A. Garfield (the 20th president), William McKinley (the 25th president) and John F. Kennedy (the 35th president). Two other presidents received injuries in attempted assassinations: the former president Theodore Roosevelt and a sitting president, Ronald Reagan.
Neither bullets nor ballots over the years have solved the equality problem. Decades after the Civil War equality still hadn’t become fact. Indeed, in 1961, the year of the birth of president-elect Barack Obama, many states, and not just those in the South, still had laws on their books restricting voting rights, enforcing segregation, and banning mixed race marriages like that of his parents. And those with guns continued to use them by killing the civil rights leader Martin Luther King in 1968.
Now, 40 years later, our southern neighbours appear to have turned their backs on an unhappy part of their history. They have chosen the ballot to vote for equality by electing an Afro-American to the highest office in the land. We can only hope and pray that we have witnessed a major change in the way they deal with race, equality, and political issues. Let’s offer all the encouragement we can.