21 Jan Obama

I’m not sad to see President Obama leave the White House. He and his family have been under the most scrutinized lens from our nation and the world since he became president. The amount of grace and decency it took for the entire family to forge ahead with their lives is beyond me. President Obama and his family have earned a much needed respite from us, the American people, and the world.

The president of the United States has the daunting responsibility of representing as many American people as he or she (one day soon) can. I consider President Obama my president, my first president, even though I’ve been voting since 1996 and have voted other men into office.

When you denied his birth on US soil, he was still my president. When you called him a Muslim with pure hatred in your speech and venom in your mouth, he was still my president. When you prevented him from making progress and curtailed his every action, he was still my president. When you used racial slurs to describe him, he was still my president. When you set a different standard for him because he was a minority, he was still my president.

“What you don’t understand is that by negating him, you forced President Obama to set the bar even higher.”

What you don’t understand is that by negating him, you forced President Obama to set the bar even higher. He has allowed my family and “others” like us to dream and succeed. We know the Oval Office is accessible to us now whereas before it was a dream carved from the ramblings of grandmas and grandpas, aunties and uncles, and people who believed that if you worked hard enough the American Dream was a reality.

I am the American Dream personified- an immigrant of Muslim decent, a woman of color who married into a Jewish family, and raising three souls to be kind as they walk this Earth. So go ahead and support our next president, I shall relish in the fact that I had President Obama as my standard, and what a standard it was!

-Samita Syed-Needelman