Was President Biden ‘Caleb’ to President Obama’s ‘Joshua’?
The Truth About the Joshua Generation
Black history is not American history, Black history is world history.
Black genealogy, dominant DNA, structural geology and cartography and geography mimics the world history of Black people, as well as its highly nuanced scriptural theme.
Why talk about it now?
Because I, and so many millions of others like me, spent nearly an entire lifetime deceived in blind faith, not only about the One we called Lord & Savior, but because what was our own history in the world was turned over to people to whom it did not belong.
It was, and is, time for it all to be revealed and a new generation ushered in.
Obama ’08 —Spiritual Joshua (re)Surfaces
I remember the moment I received that initial campaign letter in the mail from then-Senator Barack Obama. And I remember when I first saw it, balled it up and threw it in the trash can.
I didn’t know who it was from, but I assumed Hillary Clinton because I knew she was running for President. I didn’t vote for her husband in the 1990s, so I certainly wasn’t voting for her. I just wasn’t a fan of either — didn’t trust them. I was also not impressed with her husband’s politics. I won’t take his credit away, though. He blew this nation’s economy out in a way I had never seen in my short lifetime and I was in my 30s at the time.
There was no such thing as not being able to find a job. As my nee baby once said “You can step outside your door and trip over a job.” They were plentiful and abundant and where I was, in Atlanta at the time, most of them were paying pretty good — for the 1990s.
I was planning to burn my wedding photo in the silver frame and replace it with what I determined to be Senator Obama’s first Love Letter to the United States of America. It was passionate. It was caring. It was well thought-out…and I nearly threw it away, assuming it was just some more empty politician-speak begging for money “and we promise we’ll make all your American Dreams come true”.
American Dream or American Nightmare?
I ceased to believe in the merits of being an American citizen around my mid- to late twenties. I had no intention of ever listening to or trusting a political mouthpiece in this nation ever again. Ronald Reagan had taught me that it was all capitalist and racist and misogynistic BS.
But then, the Holy Spirit spoke to me: “Take the paper out of the wastebasket and read it.”
I was hesitant at first, because usually, when I tossed something out, I didn’t dare put my hand back in a waste bin to take it out. I reached in, took it out, smoothed out the wrinkles with both hands, and I read it. I had no clue why I was reading it except out of an act of blind obedience. It had an ending I did not expect.
By the time I finished, I was crying up streams and meadows of tears. Then I saw the name at the end of the letter and said what a lot of other people probably did…”Who in the world …?!” What country did he come from, is what I wanted to know. If he is he a citizen of this country, that’s an unusual name. But if he is running for President, he must be from here…just a unique name, like mine.
In all fairness to myself, after I went online and googled his name, I discovered he lived in Chicago. And you can’t begin to imagine what shocked the crap out of me when I clicked on images. I’d never heard of him because, like I said, I didn’t vote for Bill Clinton and I didn’t live in Illinois. There was no reason for me to have heard of him prior to this.
I re-folded the crumpled smoothed out letter into three sections, as it was delivered to me. Then I heard these words:
“He will be President. He will be elected twice, and they will try and stop him, but he will prevail both times. This is the one I have blessed to lead, but be aware that he will not be accepted, and a horrible time will come to the United States soon after he is gone. This wretched thing must come to pass so that the people will understand that the nation will not continue on as it has in the past.”
I knew one of the toughest fights was going to be introducing this Black AFRICAN-AMERICAN man “whom no one heard of until now” to others. I knew that in Georgia, his name was going to be less acceptable than “Darquavius Travious”, but I drew in a deep breath, got on Team Obama early in the game and went through so much not only helping people register to vote, but looking up everything I could find online about him so I wouldn’t be totally ignorant when I got the curious looks I knew I would get.
I heard all the “Who is that?” and “THEY ain’t gonna let him win”’s until I couldn’t take any more. I bit my nails and wondered if I had really heard from God at all, or did I just tell myself something that God got blamed for? I had to educate myself on not only why he was going to win, but on why I was voting for him.
I’d nearly memorized every policy he said he stood for, watched every promise he made, got mad when he said stuff I didn’t agree with, and got mad at people who didn’t agree with him when he was right.
Just another day in LaLaCampaignland, right? Not really. I found myself not only teaching people about the Illinois Senator and his dreams, and how they should be our dreams too, but I also ended up teaching a lot of electoral and U.S. history also. I had forgotten much, but I knew where to look for answers.
I needed to make sure I helped Obama and his constituency win the day in Atlanta, even though I knew he didn’t have a cold shot in hell of winning over the blood red State of Georgia. I considered a visit to any of the smaller towns outside of Augusta, Savannah and maybe Macon, a waste of the campaign’s money and time. The state was too full of small redneckian towns filled with some of the most uneducated hillbillies in all the land. But I was talking to myself, not them.
I was not mistaken about President Obama, now eight years out of office.
I never saw him as “The One,” or anything of that over-emphasized spiritual nature. I knew he was just a regular human male being and that 500+ years of institutional histrionic inherited racism was not going to be absolutely felled by his presence, and I told people to not make a mistake about that; but I also knew that it was the beginning of the end.
So far, so good…
Joshua and Caleb
Joshua and Caleb were known in their times as the two courageous men who ran into an unknown situation in Canaan under God’s orders, with no clue who or what would meet them there. They might have been afraid, but they had seen God work before, so they came back to the people with a “good report”.
Moses had sent twelve out to assess the land, the ground, the people currently living there, and to find out where its fortresses and buttresses were located and to bring back some fruit from the land. The others came back in fear and with a defeatist attitude talking about “giants” in the land, but it was Joshua and Caleb who demanded “Where is your faith in God?”
This is essentially the same way then-Senator Obama started his campaign…as the leader of The Latter-day Joshua Generation.
For certain of us, the Moses Generation had gotten us through most of the Radical Reconstruction, but these leaders, Barack H. Obama and Joseph R. Biden came in on the tail end of the Moses Generation. They came to lead us over into the Promised Land of the United States, where the locusts would not just disappear overnight.
They were the lead-off to the beginning of the end of this nation’s hateful and racist past. Today, we are watching it go down — black and white pulling together to strike down the demonic forces of the past in ways that we never have before and some of us thought impossible, definitely not since April 4, 1968.
Is There Anything God Can’t Do?
I had to first understand how we got in this mess in the first place.
The nation had just gone through the shock of 9–11, the deconstruction of its so-called ‘right to privacy’, and the stillborn belief that those who attacked the country through its most vulnerable veins in high places, were still at-large and had gone majorly unpunished.
When I heard Obama had vetted Biden as his Vice-President my heart leapt in my chest because I knew it was an excellent choice. He had been told to pick someone that he knew he could trust and Biden was just such a person.
I kind of giggled about the idea that all those fears we had about the alleged “first Black President” being killed on sight wasn’t going to happen on Biden’s watch. I called this “Caleb” metaphor “one of the biggest Irish-Catholic mob bosses in the land.” I also loved the way Veep Biden, after they were both sworn in, not only showed all respect for this Black man as his boss, but also as his leader, and the way he called him “MY President”.
People literally had the nerve to try to consult Vice-President Biden in President Obama’s place. We know how they do, but Biden would say to them “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the boss.”
I never thought I’d live to see such a thing. It was like finally being able to take a cool dip of water at a dry and barren well that had been drained for hundreds of years before I was ever born.
We didn’t just find out who we are in the world as an Afrocentric people, but we watched every racial trope and stereotype that was launched at us fore more than 400 years regurgitate itself out of their own souls in 2015–2016.
Then we ended up with a pandemic called COVID-19 that never would have happened if Hillary Clinton had been seated in her duly-elected seat in the Oval. I didn’t vote for her, but she still won; so for me, anything was better than Trump, even George W. Bush.
Better is yet to come
As a first-line beneficiary of the Civil Rights Movement, it didn’t hit me until later in life that when Dr. King and his support base spoke of “the children”, they didn’t just mean his children, but me and all the little ones who were coming up, and upon whom they would rely in the future to finish what they started. Except, #NOT.
Sadly, there was an entire delay of a generation (40 years) because of the way we (the young folk of the time, circa 1968–2008) “wandered in the wilderness” of the semblance of freedom. We weren’t truly free. It just looked that way.
Our generation used their “freedom” as occasion to party it up in clubs, get high, stay imbibed, reproduce and destabilize multitudes of children out of wedlock, turn our backs on our legacy and history, turn away from our elders and ancestors who managed to do more with a pen, a pencil, a paper notebook, and a pay phone than we seem to get done now with the entire world at the tip of our fingers and only one-secondth of a keystroke away.
Our generation had a severe hand in despoiling the legacy that was left for us, and it would take a full 40 years for us to get back on our feet again — and we’re still struggling to restabilize, there is much by way of opposition.
Two fearless and ready appeared at a needful time.
I don’t find it uncanny that just before Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was assassinated in the same year as Martin Luther King Jr., only a few months apart, that RFK Sr. said it was highly probable that [paraphrased] “in the next 40 years, it would not be out of the question for the country to see a ‘Negro’ President.” (Negro was the word of choice at the time.)
It was prophetic and it came to pass just as Kennedy said it would, almost exactly 40 years later.
It was a very important lesson that we learned from Joshua and Caleb, not as some random youth group making up cute kitschy names for their campfire church picnic project, but it was a living witness and testimony about HAVING FAITH, even when it doesn’t look like things are going the way we think they should.
Obama and Biden weren’t “the answer” for us. There is only One Answer, but he was the modern-day signal that The Answer is on the way.
Sadly, the United States of America is not equipped to handle it. Yet.
Donald J. Trump remains an outgrowth of the racism and grade school haterade that the USA refuses to let go of, and amazingly enough, as it would turn out as of 2015, a full one-third of the voting public (70/MILLION+ PEOPLE!) were the ones trying to keep the nation from growing organically into a full-grown adult nation.
Good thing there are nearly 250/MILLION+ others who saw the light of day and nearly 90/MILLION of them fired Trump as an officer of this nation.
We need the spirit of Joshua and Caleb in ALL races; not the stench of Haman and the Amalekites of any race.
“Choose you this day whom you will serve, but as for me and my house …” — Joshua 24:15
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