Obama’s America 2016

Official photographic portrait of US President Barack Obama (born 4 August 1961; assumed office 20 January 2009) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I just watched 2016. It is a fascinating and very compelling movie. It is full of history and background of Barack Obama, much from his own books. It is a way to get to know the man. What I took away from the movie is, that he is not the man we see when we look at him. Growing up in the US, white or black, we grew up, got jobs to better ourselves, knowing that hard work would produce results, and most of us grew up in a Christian environment. All of these things colored the way we think and who we became.

When I first started reading and discussing various topics on public forums like mylot, the thing I was shocked to discover was that my relatively small world was now very large. There were people I talked to from all over the world who did not think or grow up as I did, and whose values or core of beliefs were vastly different. I found I did not know how to relate to someone who did not understand how I grew up and where my thought processes came from. That basic frame of reference that everything grew out of was not universal to people who did not grow up in the US.  I felt a little disconcerted and almost unstable, in that what made up my core was not the only one there was in the world and I had no way to relate or understand where they were coming from. It was the first time I realized that people were not all alike.

In watching the history and childhood, friends and companions of Obama, I was shocked to realize he was vastly different. He was in no way a typical American as we know it. He grew up in countries who were occupied by other countries and whose resources were fair game. He grew up thinking that large super powers such as the US were the bad guys and the small countries were struggling freedom fighters. One of the most sobering pictures was a young school choir singing praises to Obama with Obama’s flag behind them. There has never been praise sung to other presidents. This made you think of China, or North Korea, where children are taught to worship the leader.

If you love Obama or if you don’t, this movie tells a lot of who Obama is and how he thinks, much of it from his own written words. It is well worth watching.