politics

It's a stage-managed set-up, choreographed down to the hand-selected crowd of diverse-as-we-can-manage teenagers told to wear church clothes-- whatever that means-- to an assembly in an unnaturally empty high school they don't attend.

I don't care.

Because despite photo op, despite fund raiser (the true trip agenda), despite political push that just needs a live audience, the fact remains that the President is coming- the President!- and a Haitian boy four months out of a now-crumbled orphanage will be there.

"It's like a dream," he really said, and though I expect some teenage shade of he-just-talked-he-didn't-see-me-it-was-boring disappointment on Thursday, the fact remains that this brand new American is going to see his President, and he's excited. So am I.

I'm told that plenty of students were irked at not being chosen: the usual StuCo Honor Society suspects are too many in number-- and largely too pale in complexion- to be selected by default. Instead, the administrative viewfinder widened- by order, it appears- and through a little affirmative racial profiling action a few equally upstanding but lesser known kids appeared on the schoolwide radar. So be it: from the purely artificial something genuine has sprung.