Inspiration Frustration

This week I had the good fortune to meet a truly inspirational American woman - Martha Hawkins. She was the guest speaker at an Interfaith breakfast I was covering. Martha is pretty much the stereotypical Black Southern momma - she greeted me with a hug not a handshake and was as round and jolly as Santa Claus.
During her talk, Martha only hinted at her life struggles, so when I got home I downloaded her book, Finding Martha's Place. It was powerful stuff about how she rose from a life of mental illness and poverty in the Montgomery projects in Alabama to running her own restaurant. Martha grew up at the time of the Civil Rights movement, and having met her, it was amazing to see how she could have ever amounted to anything from such humble beginnings.
I couldn't put the book down. You couldn't help but feel proud for the way Black Americans have overcome their struggles to reach the point they have. At the end she referenced Barak Obama and you could feel the pride of an entire race behind him.
On an iPad you can go from one thing to another in one click. As soon as I finished reading, I looked at my e mails. Someone had sent me one of those silly things that go the rounds that I don't much care for.
I'm still shaking with anger as I write this. This time it was a selection of photos showing Michele Obama's fashion faux pas. The first picture showed a group of people at with her saying it was like the Jeffersons' had visited the White House.
In a democracy everyone is entitled to their own opinions of course. But throwing together a load of photos which include captions like saying Michele looks like a maid or will never have the class of Laura Bush is not clever or entertaining, it's puerile. Guess at the end of it all, what's important is not how people overcome adversity, it's what kind of shoes they choose to wear.