Oprah is black!

I was flipping through the channels the other day and watched the beginning of the Kennedy Center Honors thing a ma bob

I wasn’t but a few minutes into it before I realized something

                    Oprah is black!

Now I know this may come as a shock for some of you as it was for me.

I knew she was a woman

  I knew she was immensely successful

    I knew she is incredibly powerful

      I knew she has more money than Scrooge McDuck

It just never really registered with me that she was black.

                                         I always just saw her as a human.

The color of a person’s skin means about the same to me as the color of their socks.

It is the person that dwells within that skin that is the important matter.

Unfortunately everyone starts out on the bottom rung of the ladder in my mind. Unless it can be proven to me otherwise, everyone is beneath contempt but equally. I hold myself on that ladder too, dear reader. I don’t hold any elevated ideas of my worth or that I am better than anyone else.

I have an abundant number of flaws and I am quicker than most to point them out.

      If I were to believe in yearly resolutions then that would be mine.

To consciously try and improve upon myself more than ever before.

I have spent too long just waiting for a better me to develop.

This new year I will endeavor to at least try to be a better me.

A me I can actually be proud of.

I can still recall with acute and painful clarity the last time I was strong and proud of where I was and who I was.

                                                                          1999

 From there I slid.

You know the movie “Romancing the Stone”? The scene when Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner were in the rain and the ground gave away causing them to slide and slalom down the mud slide?

                                  .. yeah it has felt like that for a decade.

Fortunately I “think” I have reached bottom and started my climb back out  

(unfortunately I did not land between the thighs of a young and lithe Kathleen Turner but ah well. I did qualify that with the YOUNG Turner though, not the raspy linebacker of today.)

I don't feel the oppressive gloom and doom I once did. 

Its not all dark and death and skulls and tombs and evil and bleak and desolate and lonely and disheartening and… stuff.

I am nowhere near puppies and sunshine yet and I truly doubt I can ever be again

but I will end my days on this planet trying.

                           OH!

                  Ok?

well… that train took an detour indeed. 

I was going to one place and ended up somewhere completely different.

Should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

To return to the top up there…I think what I was trying to say

A poor black woman becoming such a public and yes historical icon is quite an achievement.

I have so much respect for that achievement to conquer so many odds.

Not because she is famous or a celebrity.

Those are just window dressings.

Social candy with no nutritional value.

I have respect for that because she took herself to where she wanted to be and beyond.

I admire that.

I envy that.