Bye, bye Barack

This week will be the last week in office for the first Afri­can-American pres­ident of the United States. It will, perhaps, be doubly poi­gnant and triply painful for the Union’s 44th president, Barack Hussein Obama. The working week kicks off with the birth anniversary of an iconic political figure and a foremost civil-rights leader whose intense advocacy for equality for African-Ameri­cans had reached its highest moment nearly half a century later with the ascension and presidency of Obama.

At the end of the week after commemorating the life of Martin Luther King Jr., Obama is set to relinquish that office to someone who represents a direct rejection of what Obama had tried to es­tablish as his legacy.

Poignant and painful symbolisms cannot be denied. Obama’s successor has been accused, albeit recklessly, as being a white supremacist, although that is most likely a brazen lie conjured up by Left-wingers and the Ameri­can mainstream media.

The White House that Obama vacates once stood on a swamp, the land beneath muddy, unstable and infested with vermin. The house it­self was built with slave labor, the kind from which Obama founds his roots on one side and his mandate on another. The African-Americans had, indeed, come around. Unfor­tunately fate is such a cruel prankster that it should bid him a farewell that could have been more victorious and tri­umphant than it is.

When Obama had first stood at the steps of the Capi­tol to take his oath of office as president, we cheered along, kept rare commemorative badges and treasured those among other mementos of that historic moment. The dif­ference between Obama and his predecessor was as stark as the difference was between our new President then from his predecessor. Those differ­ences helped in invigorating the hopes we pinned on both.

Obama won a second term. It was not the case in our neck of the woods. We suffered as the six-year pres­idency simply plodded along nurtured by economic laurels long established before his in­cumbency.

Last week, to tug at heart­strings on the occasion of his departure from office, Obama chose to deliver his valedic­tory in Chicago, his adopted city from where he started his quest for the presidency. The choice of Chicago eloquently symbolized why Hillary Clin­ton, despite the money, the machinery, and the unquali­fied support by Obama, lost to Donald Trump.

While Chicago repre­sented especially nostalgic moments and personal turn­ing points for Obama, on the far and opposite end of what those meant to him, in stark contrast between a person­al agenda as opposed to the public’s, the city ironically symbolizes what the Unit­ed States had become since Obama’s declaration.

In certain neighborhoods of Chicago, concerned par­ents stand on street corners at specific hours of the day. There, they keep an eye on children as they stream to and from school, making sure that the children are safe from the predators that lurk and stalk the vulnerable. A civi­lized society should need no such vigilance. But Chicago is a city where gang violence erupts without warning and policemen are ambushed as they answer 911 calls. Chicago represents what America had become in eight years and the depths that American society had sunk to.

One, Chicago is a self-de­clared haven for illegal immi­grants, a burning issue for a president-elect who won on a platform of building walls and the selective vetting of immi­grants.

Two, Chicago is now one of the most dangerous Amer­ican cities. Its crime rate is among the Union’s highest.

Three, in the last year alone, the incidences of the deliberate killing of policemen were exemplified in Chicago with the murder rate sharply skewing north as the inaugu­ration of the new president approaches.

Four, Chicago openly de­fies what might eventually be the agenda of a new president thus, qualifying its Chicago of­ficials as brazenly seditious.

If the foregoing does not yet symbolize the dispari­ty between the America that Obama feels he is leaving to Donald Trump versus what Trump actually inherits, the following specifies in defini­tive statistics the failures of the last eight years under Obama against the change platform that Trump proposes to work on.

The GDP growth rate under Obama is the lowest among America’s modern-day presidents, including the post-war economy under the Truman years that recorded a GDP growth rate of 1.7 per­cent. Adjusted for inflation the growth rate under Obama was 1.5 percent, recorded in 2015.

Admittedly Obama inher­ited a failed economy under his predecessor. That failed economy, however, had a growth rate of 2.1 percent at its worst year.

Worse, the median house­hold income did not im­prove since 2009. Americans propped by state welfare re­mains unchanged. Only until recently, post-elections, the jobs data and labor participa­tion statistics hovered around its 40-year low. Poverty inci­dence grew by as much as 17 percent. American debt rose by 77 percent. Combined, these validate Obama’s ane­mic growth rate.

Au revoir, Obama. If these are the numbers he sought to perpetuate through a Clinton presidency, then these prove that the Americans were jus­tifiably compelled and were right in electing Trump to de­liver inclusive changes.