What You May Not Have Known About Barak Obama

From the New York Times:

A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama's Path
By JANNY SCOTT

Published: March 14, 2008

In the capsule version of the Barack Obama story, his mother is simply
the white woman from Kansas. The phrase comes coupled alliteratively to
its counterpart, the black father from Kenya. On the campaign trail, he
has called her his "single mom." But neither description begins to
capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the
parent who most shaped Mr. Obama.

Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in
the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married
an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to
Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on
peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation,
championed women's work and helped bring microcredit to the world's
poor.

She had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would
wake her son at 4 a.m. for correspondence courses in English before
school; she brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And when Mr. Obama asked to stay in
Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living
apart - a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in Ms.
Soetoro's life.

"She felt that somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might
stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who
we are at the core," said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama's half-sister.
"That was very much her philosophy of life - to not be limited by fear
or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do
our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places."

Ms. Soetoro, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, was the parent who
raised Mr. Obama, the Illinois senator running for the Democratic
presidential nomination. He barely saw his father after the age of 2.
Though it is impossible to pinpoint the imprint of a parent on the life
of a grown child, people who knew Ms. Soetoro well say they see her
influence unmistakably in Mr. Obama.

They were close, her friends and his half-sister say, though they spent
much of their lives with oceans or continents between them. He would
not be where he is today, he has said, had it not been for her. Yet he
has also made some different choices - marrying into a tightly knit
African-American family rooted in the South Side of Chicago, becoming a
churchgoing Christian, publicly recounting his search for his identity
as a black man.

Some of what he has said about his mother seems tinged with a mix of
love and regret. He has said his biggest mistake was not being at her
bedside when she died. And when The Associated Press asked the
candidates about "prized keepsakes" - others mentioned signed
baseballs, a pocket watch, a "trophy wife" - Mr. Obama said his was a
photograph of the cliffs of the South Shore of Oahu in Hawaii where his
mother's ashes were scattered.

"I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness,
I might have written a different book - less a meditation on the absent
parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my
life," he wrote in the preface to his memoir, "Dreams From My Father."
He added, "I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have
ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her."

In a campaign in which Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican
nominee, has made liberal use of his globe-trotting 96-year-old mother
to answer suspicions that he might be an antique at 71, Mr. Obama, who
declined to be interviewed for this article, invokes his mother's
memory sparingly. In one television advertisement, she appears
fleetingly - porcelain-skinned, raven-haired and holding her toddler
son. "My mother died of cancer at 53," he says in the ad, which focuses
on health care. "In those last painful months, she was more worried
about paying her medical bills than getting well."

'A Very, Very Big Thinker'

He has described her as a teenage mother, a single mother, a mother who
worked, went to school and raised children at the same time. He has
credited her with giving him a great education and confidence in his
ability to do the right thing. But, in interviews, friends and
colleagues of Ms. Soetoro shed light on a side of her that is less well
known.

"She was a very, very big thinker," said Nancy Barry, a former
president of Women's World Banking, an international network of
microfinance providers, where Ms. Soetoro worked in New York City in
the early 1990s. "I think she was not at all personally ambitious, I
think she cared about the core issues, and I think she was not afraid
to speak truth to power."

Her parents were from Kansas - her mother from Augusta, her father from
El Dorado, a place Mr. Obama first visited in a campaign stop in
January. Stanley Ann (her father wanted a boy so he gave her his name)
was born on an Army base during World War II. The family moved to
California, Kansas, Texas and Washington in restless pursuit of
opportunity before landing in Honolulu in 1960.

In a Russian class at the University of Hawaii, she met the college's
first African student, Barack Obama. They married and had a son in
August 1961, in an era when interracial marriage was rare in the United
States. Her parents were upset, Senator Obama learned years later from
his mother, but they adapted. "I am a little dubious of the things that
people from foreign countries tell me," the senator's grandmother told
an interviewer several years ago.

The marriage was brief. In 1963, Mr. Obama left for Harvard, leaving
his wife and child. She then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian
student. When he was summoned home in 1966 after the turmoil
surrounding the rise of Suharto, Ms. Soetoro and Barack followed.

Those choices were not entirely surprising, said several high school
friends of Ms. Soetoro, whom they remembered as unusually intelligent,
curious and open. She never dated "the crew-cut white boys," said one
friend, Susan Blake: "She had a world view, even as a young girl. It
was embracing the different, rather than that ethnocentric thing of
shunning the different. That was where her mind took her."

Her second marriage faded, too, in the 1970s. Ms. Soetoro wanted to
work, one friend said, and Mr. Soetoro wanted more children. He became
more American, she once said, as she became more Javanese. "There's a
Javanese belief that if you're married to someone and it doesn't work,
it will make you sick," said Alice G. Dewey, an anthropologist and
friend. "It's just stupid to stay married."

That both unions ended is beside the point, some friends suggested. Ms.
Soetoro remained loyal to both husbands and encouraged her children to
feel connected to their fathers. (In reading drafts of her son's
memoir, Mr. Obama has said, she did not comment upon his depiction of
her but was "quick to explain or defend the less flattering aspects of
my father's character.")

"She always felt that marriage as an institution was not particularly
essential or important," said Nina Nayar, who later became a close
friend of Ms. Soetoro. What mattered to her, Ms. Nayar said, was to
have loved deeply.

By 1974, Ms. Soetoro was back in Honolulu, a graduate student and
raising Barack and Maya, nine years younger. Barack was on scholarship
at a prestigious prep school, Punahou. When Ms. Soetoro decided to
return to Indonesia three years later for her field work, Barack chose
not to go.

"I doubted what Indonesia now had to offer and wearied of being new all
over again," he wrote in his memoir. "More than that, I'd arrived at an
unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they'd
leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight." During those
years, he was "engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to
raise myself to be a black man in America." Ms. Soetoro-Ng recalled her
mother's quandary. "She wanted him to be with her," Ms. Soetoro-Ng
said. But she added: "Although it was painful to be separated from him
for his last four years of high school, she recognized that it was
perhaps the best thing for him. And she had to go to Indonesia at that
time."

That time apart was hard for both mother and son.

"She longed for him," said Georgia McCauley, who became a friend of Ms.
Soetoro in Jakarta. Barack spent summers and Christmas vacations with
his mother; they communicated by letters, his illustrated with
cartoons. Her first topic of conversation was always her son, her
female friends said. As for him, he was grappling with questions of
racial identity, alienation and belonging.

"There were certainly times in his life in those four years when he
could have used her presence on a more daily basis," Ms. Soetoro-Ng
said. "But I think he did all right for himself."

Fluent in Indonesian, Ms. Soetoro moved with Maya first to Yogyakarta,
the center of Javanese handicrafts. A weaver in college, she was
fascinated with what Ms. Soetoro-Ng calls "life's gorgeous minutiae."
That interest inspired her study of village industries, which became
the basis of her 1992 doctoral dissertation.

"She loved living in Java," said Dr. Dewey, who recalled accompanying
Ms. Soetoro to a metalworking village. "People said: 'Hi! How are you?'
She said: 'How's your wife? Did your daughter have the baby?' They were
friends. Then she'd whip out her notebook and she'd say: 'How many of
you have electricity? Are you having trouble getting iron?' "

She became a consultant for the United States Agency for International
Development on setting up a village credit program, then a Ford
Foundation program officer in Jakarta specializing in women's work.
Later, she was a consultant in Pakistan, then joined Indonesia's oldest
bank to work on what is described as the world's largest sustainable
microfinance program, creating services like credit and savings for the
poor.

Visitors flowed constantly through her Ford Foundation office in
downtown Jakarta and through her house in a neighborhood to the south,
where papaya and banana trees grew in the front yard and Javanese
dishes like opor ayam were served for dinner. Her guests were leaders
in the Indonesian human rights movement, people from women's
organizations, representatives of community groups doing grass-roots
development.

"I didn't know a lot of them and would often ask after, 'Who was
that?' " said David S. McCauley, now an environmental economist at the
Asian Development Bank in Manila, who had the office next door. "You'd
find out it was the head of some big organization in with thousands of
members from central Java or someplace, somebody that she had met some
time ago, and they would make a point of coming to see her when they
came to Jakarta."

An Exacting Idealist

As a mother, Ms. Soetoro was both idealistic and exacting. Friends
describe her as variously informal and intense, humorous and
hardheaded. She preached to her young son the importance of honesty,
straight talk, independent judgment. When he balked at her
early-morning home schooling, she retorted, "This is no picnic for me
either, buster."

When Barack was in high school, she confronted him about his seeming
lack of ambition, Mr. Obama wrote. He could get into any college in the
country, she told him, with just a little effort. ("Remember what
that's like? Effort?") He says he looked at her, so earnest and sure of
his destiny: "I suddenly felt like puncturing that certainty of hers,
letting her know that her experiment with me had failed."

Ms. Soetoro-Ng, who herself became an anthropologist, remembers
conversations with her mother about philosophy or politics, books,
esoteric Indonesian woodworking motifs. One Christmas in Indonesia, Ms.
Soetoro found a scrawny tree and decorated it with red and green chili
peppers and popcorn balls.

"She gave us a very broad understanding of the world," her daughter
said. "She hated bigotry. She was very determined to be remembered for
a life of service and thought that service was really the true measure
of a life." Many of her friends see her legacy in Mr. Obama - in his
self-assurance and drive, his boundary bridging, even his apparent
comfort with strong women. Some say she changed them, too.

"I feel she taught me how to live," said Ms. Nayar, who was in her 20s
when she met Ms. Soetoro at Women's World Banking. "She was not
particularly concerned about what society would say about working
women, single women, women marrying outside their culture, women who
were fearless and who dreamed big."

The Final Months

After her diagnosis, Ms. Soetoro spent the last months of her life in
Hawaii, near her mother. (Her father had died.) Mr. Obama has recalled
talking with her in her hospital bed about her fears of ending up
broke. She was not ready to die, he has said. Even so, she helped him
and Maya "push on with our lives, despite our dread, our denials, our
sudden constrictions of the heart."

She died in November 1995, as Mr. Obama was starting his first campaign
for public office. After a memorial service at the University of
Hawaii, one friend said, a small group of friends drove to the South
Shore in Oahu. With the wind whipping the waves onto the rocks, Mr.
Obama and Ms. Soetoro-Ng placed their mother's ashes in the Pacific,
sending them off in the direction of Indonesia.

These are the true facts about Obama. However, with Obama's plans, there is an energy of "the Government will do it for me" and if people fall into that mindset, the country will experience things similar to what Russia in the early 20th century experienced. Unless there is a huge evolution in consciousness of this country, there is the risk of it falling back. You may not think the country can go any lower, but it can.

The way to make sure it doesn't happen is to be unconditionally responsible for your life. Discover the art of connecting, and how to turn around dis empowering feelings and thoughts. Keep your entrepreneurial spirit and this country will do well