Today the first black man in the history of the world comes to great power. This is an astonishing thing in and of itself; 140 years ago America had our civil war; the Brits sneer at "America's Founding Sin" but they outlawed slavery only thirty years before we fought a war over it. And today Barack Hussein Obama is inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, and fifty years ago blacks couldn't sit at the same lunch counter as whites in some places. Time does march on. And I see nothing wrong with time marching on.

When my mother moved to Culo de Pecos in the early 40s, whites could pay a nickel and have a Coke at the lunch counter of Ben's Pharmacy; Mexicans had to take their Coke outside to drink it. Mom remarked in the 60s that their nickel was just as good as hers. I recall, in very early childhood, the court house having "White Only" restrooms. They are now much more sensibly ordered by sex, more sensibly also because we're not French.

After the Civil War, blacks were horribly traduced by Jim Crow and just plain violence; it was slavery by other means, and just for the crime of being black. This was a blot on America's history for all Americans are owed equal protection under the law.

As an effort to equalize the races, people came up with Affirmative Action, which was really reverse discrimination. My brother and father are of the opinion that barriers ought to be eliminated and that finishes our obligations. I am a bit, perhaps, to the left of that, thinking that an invitation does no harm. If a door has been closed for decades to you, you might not notice that it's been opened. This it not to say that I believe in preferential treatment, just a welcome mat. To this end corporations like Apple, IBM and even Wal-Mart and Pepsico have established departments making gays welcome, stating that they wanted the talent. I very much hope however that the talent is the sole reason for hiring and I don't mean decorating talent.

We all remember the Bakke case, in which Allan Bakke sued the University of California at Davis Medical School for accepting black applicants with lower scores than his. If you do business with the government in any fashion, no matter how small, you're made to fill out a questionnaire which determines if you're female-owned, minority-owned and so forth, so that you can get in on the spoils system. Or be denied business because of the spoils system. This spoils system gave us in Culo de Pecos a minority contractor who poured a ditch for TexDOT which would work only if water ran uphill, but that's another story. The point being that the qualification for the job was not competence but skin color and sex.

There are blacks who claim that there's no use trying to succeed because The Man has set it up so that blacks cannot succeed, no matter what they do and blacks who do try are dismissed, with the sneer, as "Toms." I take this as an excuse not to try, and to traffic in grievances. Which have proven to profitable and are a good deal easier than work although they are corrosive to the soul while trying is fortifying.

I am not the Man. Neither were my parents. I can understand that blacks would be very angry over Jim Crow, just as I am very angry over Matthew Shepherd. However, I never believed in discrimination and grew up in a house which did not believe in it and as of today I refuse to suffer these accusations.

Barack Obama was elected because he is black. The joke is that the USPS is going to print his résumé on a postage stamp so his election certainly wasn't from experience and his friends and associates mean that he couldn't pass the security clearance to be his own bodyguard. He is an appealing figure: intelligent, neither frightening nor angry, which is why he was elected by whites for without whites the numbers just wouldn't be there.

When Barack Obama was inaugurated as the most powerful man in the world, and the most powerful black man in the history of the world, bar none, it expiated past sins of Jim Crow. It is now entirely appropriate for anyone who hears complaints about not being able to succeed because of The Man to say, "You are the Man. It's time for you to man up and get on with it."