Rant #3,408: Black and White

I admit, I don't know that much about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who Vice President Kamala Harris chose as her running mate in the November election.

Here is what I do know: Minnesota has a large Palestinian population, so I guarantee this will be brought up by the opposition as it relates to her, and his, overall position on Israel.

And you just kind of knew she would not pick Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, because of his Jewish background. Lots of people would hold that against her, and she did not want to get into any tangles related to her campaign being "too Jewish."

Yes, there are still people who believe Jews are emissaries of the devil, and with the rise of anti-Semitism in this country, she didn't want to have to deal with any possibility of that into November and if she won, for the next four years.

I am interested in finding out why Harris chose Walz over Shapiro ... was it to kind of pacify the far left of her party, was it Shapiro's religion, or was it some other reason?

Like a true politician, she probably won't say the truth, but will break it down so no one is offended.

(And as an aside, this is the first presidential combo thst are both younger than me--Harris is 58 years of age, and while her running mate looks a lot older, he is only 60 years of age.)

Funny, we have already had a Jewish president ... well, sort of.

Dwight D. Eisenhower's father was Jewish of, i believe, German descent, while his mother was of mixed heritage, including, from what I have read, black.

About Eisenhower's Jewish background, he pretty much ignored it entirely.

He promoted himself through his mother's background, but not the black part of it.

His mother was also Swedish, so he went with that, and she was a Mennonite and a Lutheran as far as religion, so he pretty much went with that, too.

During his military career, there were some questions about his "loyalty" to America, because of his Jewish background, however much he ignored it.

So decades before President Barack Obama, we have had a President with at least some black heritage, and as far as a Jewish president, he probably is the closest we ever came to having one ... and who knows if we will ever have one?

But funny, I will bet that if modern genealogy tests could be done on all the presidents we have had, we would probably find several more with some black heritage, and probably several with Eastern European background, perhaps even some Jewishness in there.

Even though it is more prevalent in current times, there was always intermingling, if you know what I mean, between the races and religions in this country, and I will bet that our presidents reflected this as much as the general population did 

We all know about Thomas Jefferson, who himself was not black, but propagated generations of blacks through his relationships with black slaves that he owned.

One of his slaves, Sally Hemings, had at least a half dozen children with him--that we know--but did he have other children with his female slaves?

We are all Americans, but there are some of us who want to break it down to the nub, using it to define ourselves granularity.

It is wrong to do this, but the media, in particular, loves to do this.

There really is nothing you can do about it, but I try to ignore it, especially when it comes to politics.

In college, I had a friend who told me flat out, that I was the first Jewish person he had ever been friendly with.

He was Italian, and, of course, he was not the first Italian that I had been friendly with.

But neither one of us harped on any of this.

We were good friends during those four years of my life, we were in the same boat as students, and that was all that was important.

Again, I wish the real world was like that, but it simply isn't.

Too bad that it isn't that way, don't you agree?