Good morning, Barack Obama Elementary School!" That is what children attending the former Ludlum Elementary in Hempstead, New York have been hearing ever since the local school district board voted unanimously to change the name to honor the United States' first black president.Good grief. I think I'm going to be ill.
Barack Obama took office barely 10 days ago, but already schools and streets are being renamed. In the Hempstead case they didn't even wait until Inauguration Day, re-christening the school back in November -- the first in the nation to do so.
For the students, it's music to their ears, gushed school principal Jean Bligen.
They "want to keep this interest, this high belief that we can really make a difference, that we can change our community, that we can change our nation, that we can make the world a better place," Bligen said.
Experts say this baptizing phenomenon is unique to an incoming American leader riding a wave of optimism at the beginning of his presidency.After four years of this disaster will these idiots change the name again?
"This is highly unusual," said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor of popular culture.
"Usually this thing doesn't take place until the president is out of office and often until the president has actually died."
But the "hope for some kind of utopia" during the Democratic Obama administration after eight years of Republican president George W. Bush has proven too powerful for some to wait, Thompson and others said.
Then we have people naming streets after this con artist.
In Opa-Locka, a majority-black Miami, Florida suburb of 25,000 people, street signs already reflect a Barack Obama Avenue. The name will be inaugurated on Presidents Day, February 16.
"We are proud of the accomplishment of the 44th president and we want to leave a legacy for the next generation to embrace, and to make sure that we embrace diversity," local commissioner Dorothy Johnson, who proposed the measure, told AFP.
St. Louis, Missouri has also named a street after the president, and in Hollywood, Florida residents Thomas and Theresa Smith embarked on a crusade to have a thoroughfare renamed Barack Obama Boulevard.
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