Please excuse the “Obama is our Savior” reference but I couldn’t resist.

Recently, my wife and I sat down to watch Chris Rock’s Head of State movie. For a while I’ve been thinking about the ironies of that movie and Barack Obama’s current and future campaign footsteps. You know…the opposition campaigning on the platforms of political and military experience without a true campaign foundation, White people in California storming the streets to vote to prevent a Black president, envisioning winning the election only to immediately experience an assassination attempt. Still, the movie amazingly hits more truer cords than that. Rock’s character Mays Gilliam actually raises real issues such as health care, childcare, underemployment, and war. Even more poignantly, Mays Gilliam calls out his competitor on his catch phrase, “God bless America…and no place else”. Mays flips the script to, “God bless America! God bless Africa! God bless Jamaica! And not the beach Jamaica. I’m talking bout real Jamaica. You know…stabbing Jamaica.”

I don’t know if Chris Rock knows something the rest of us don’t or if he coincidentally made a below average movie that just happens to hit at the heart of a presidential campaign 5 years after his film was released. Either way, Chris Rock may’ve been inadvertently setting us up mentally for something no one could’ve known would be so close to coming true now.

As high as tensions have stretched over the past months this clip helped me realize that sometimes we all have to take a step back and realize that we’re all people of the same country seeking many of the same things. The divisiveness and dilutedness of the political process drives frustration and animosity that belongs no where near deciding who should be the next person WE give the power to make key decisions for our country. When we fight amongst ourselves is when we are at our weakest. Unfortunately, so many of us are so used to losing we’re too blind to see how we can win.