Wednesday, November 05, 2008
No dire predictions here
Unforeseen Contingencies salutes Ann Nixon Cooper, apparently the oldest voter in this election. While it's sad that Senator Obama's grandmother didn't make it to see this moment, it's quite nice that Mrs. Cooper, who saw the rise of Jim Crow, has lived to see a black man win by a landslide.
I'm reminded of something I regularly saw in Beijing...grandparents taking their grandchildren to McDonald's. I could hardly fathom the spectrum of things these people had lived through, and I suspect they couldn't either... from the Great Leap Forward, through the Cultural Revolution, to McDonald's... from some of communism's most vicious episodes to the triumph of American-style fun. Unforeseen contingencies indeed, and the good ones tend to outweigh the bad.
Ann Cooper can attest to this.
