Makes you think!
I also read this series about "the Black princess" this morning, also fascinating: https://royalsuitor.medium.com/house-of-windsor-ii-the-flight-of-icarus-e16357232bf6
I was very late to the party understanding what was going on, because I didn't figure out that Markle was Black until a few months ago. No, I'm not "color-blind" (i.e. complacent in privilege), I'm simply sick to death of the royals, and I publicly repudiated them when they did nothing about Brexit, so I really had only the faintest idea who "Megan" was.
And my relationship to Obama is complicated. (me, me me!) I cried with relief when he was elected. The various Birther conspiracy theories just fill me full of rage. It's only luck, and living in New York City, that meant that I didn't get into a fistfight with some mouth-breather claiming that Michelle was a transsexual male.
And yet Obama was also the reason I gave up on America entirely. I believe that the Obama administration was the last chance of America and of the world to step back from the bring, and he simply squandered that opportunity on drone strikes, pointless wars in the Middle East, and an obsession with fossil fuels.
By the end of of his administration, the US was the largest producer of oil in the world. I still remember how he protected BP from the consequences of the Deepwater Horizon, and how his Energy Department signed a record number of permits to drill in the Gulf of Mexico that very next year, a record only broken by him two years later.
The worst for me is that no one, on either side!, seemed to care about these issues. I used to go to anti-war demonstrations - the Libyan War was every bit as stupid and evil as every other US foreign war of choice, and yet there was almost no one at the demonstrations.
Objectively, it's likely that we passed the turning point decades before.
But still, I had some hope for the future at the start of the Obama administration, and by the end I had none, and I still don’t. So I can't even look at him now without feeling grief and resentment.
Blah blah blah. Thanks for the soapbox as usual!
