"The Malia Generation"
Last edited Thu Nov 8, 2012, 08:12 PM - Edit history (1)
(Nice read from the "New Yorker" blog) 
November 7, 2012
The Malia Generation
Posted by Amy Davidson
It gave a person a start when, at close to 2 A.M. on Election Night, Sasha and Malia Obama walked across the stage in Chicago with their mother and father. Four years ago, when Barack Obama was first elected President, the girls were small children—they are still just eleven and fourteen—and now Malia is about as tall as her mother. If the quarrels and deliberations associated with politics are, as Obama said in his speech, “a mark of our liberty,” then his daughters were a mark of the passage of time. Mitt Romney had tried to win the election, in part, by making people a little ashamed of how they’d felt back in 2008—that their hopes had gone bad, like adult children living in rooms and lives too small for them with, as Paul Ryan, his running mate, put it, fading Obama posters on the wall; or, at best, that they’d taken part in a noble failure. And yet some things hadn’t faded, it turned out. Obama won, and will still be the President when Malia is old enough to vote for his successor.
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Obama spoke to a very different impulse in his victory speech, which was better than anything we’ve heard from him for a long while. He finally brought up climate change. He spoke about an America “open to the dreams of an immigrant’s daughter who studies in our schools and pledges to our flag.” He used the word “love” a half dozen times, both when he spoke about the responsibilities that come with freedom—“And among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism”—and when he said, “Michelle, I have never loved you more.” Around the time their daughters were small, there was also an idea that Michelle Obama might be divisive—the angry black woman out of place in the White House. That has been thoroughly dispelled. Michelle Obama’s first term was undoubtedly a success.
“We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions,” Obama said, in what may have been the speech’s most direct retort to Mitt Romney. He said that our wealth didn’t make us rich, though we are wealthy: “What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth…. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, abled, disabled, gay or straight.” Sasha and Malia are part of a generation for whom respect for gay marriage is not an act of rebellion, but a homily—a change reflected in four different ballot initiatives.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/11/the-malia-generation.html#ixzz2BeVbqc6x
= new reply since forum marked as read
so I feel a real affinity to them.
My daughter helps us in so many tangible ways in our own efforts to help alleviate the poor who are suffering.... I just hope that the Obama girls can/will be such role models. But even if they aren't (despite their exposure to social issues) I won't blame them. They are simply the children of a powerful figure and must find their own paths.
Just a reality check that many children of powerful figures don't necessarily choose an altruistic way...
