Looking up to someone

Adrian George Nicolae
3 min readMar 16, 2019
Photo by Nik MacMillan on Unsplash

Some days you read something and you feel like you want to add something to it.
Well, today I reading an article about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the youngest congresswoman who caught America by surprise. I’m not going to say much about her because so far I’ve seen a lot of media and some old politicians be frightful, and that’s about it.
However, this article was saying that young women don’t have many political role models. And I was sitting there and thinking “Well, what about young men?”

And it made me think at how there’s a massive disparity between men, women, but also between the rich class and the non-rich class. Yeah, obviously, we already knew about that, through universities, acting, certain jobs and careers, but also politics.
And it is certainly commendable how AOC managed to get to this point despite being from a poor background, and yet I still keep thinking “Well, what about young men?”

Because, if you look at it, there aren’t many young men in politics, and if they are, they’re from a rich background, so me, personally, I could only identify with Barack Obama.
So the question is, how could a Eastern European white guy identify with an African-American?
The answer to that, Shirley, is not hard. He was personable.
“Explain.”
You see, the man had an appeal. I’m sure some Americans voted for him because he was black, but I would’ve voted for him because he was different. There’s that thing about freshness, about going out of your comfort zone. Obama was that.
And sure enough, there’s that question if doing such a thing has benefits. One thing it benefited was with homosexuals, where it still baffles me how people come out as gay on TV or wherever and people applaud and such, yet in UK, nobody seems to care. “Like, you’re gay. Great. Now what?” In the USA it’s made to be a personal achievement, and considering how the Bush regime handled it, I could understand to some extent, as it was much more freeing to be gay during the Obama regime.
In essence, what I’m trying to say is that one could identify with a person like Obama more than someone else. Just like one could identify with AOC, or to put it in superhero fashion, someone like Black Panther or Miles Morales or Wonder Woman, without being black, mixed race, or a woman.

Americans and Brits like keywords and buzzwords and all sorts of other words apart from nasty words, but why does someone have to be defined by something.
I may have wanted to like AOC, but her name was graffitied with feminism, which has become a dirty word, mostly because the people who use it haven’t decided what it means, and open-minded folk like myself are turned off by a passive-aggressive behavior. Most of all, it’s not warranted.
What about we like who we want to like, instead of them being put in certain words?

The post first appeared on my blog.

Adrian George Nicolae

Writer, comedian, improviser, deviser, creative git. And vegan. http://adriangeorgenicolae.weebly.com/