By SLAV KANYBA

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

I recently attended a memorial service for a Marine who took his own life. His name was Jeremy Grangerhill, and I found out that he died while partying on an otherwise typical Friday night at the Blue Velvet Lounge in downtown Los Angeles.

The person who shared the news, Eric, works in the music industry and shared that he noticed Grangerhill’s suicide note on his MySpace profile. 

On the eve of the memorial, I was at Blue Velvet again. I had already concluded Jeremy’s death was a result of his going to Iraq, and therefore, I concluded his death was inextricable from politics. I didn’t need someone to tell me Jeremy’s blood was on President Bush’s hands. I knew since 2001 that the Bush administration was one that made war the lynchpin of its foreign policy.

Still, although Bush sent young men like Grangerhill to witness and commit atrocities, it’s a fact that it was Grangerhill’s choice to become a soldier — just as it was his choice to check out of this world.

For the sake of this country’s progress, there is simply no place for situations like this and it all has to start with making better decisions. Barack Obama, a superb critical thinker, has stepped up, we have elected him our leader, and now he has an opportunity to help empower the young people. I know nothing if I don’t know that it’s people like me, the youth — with our hip-hop culture, clothes, music, energy — that are the capital to leverage this country’s poor financial and moral shape.

Still, there’s only so much we can do, because in this democracy, we trust our leaders to make decisions for us (in more layman’s terms, legendary rapper Rakim once said “follow the leader” and he was right). We should interpret that figuratively and literally.

Obama’s day-to-day job is managing the people who run this country. Although a lot of hope is built into Obama, we must keep in mind that, just like every other human being, he’s a work in progress. He’s not a saint, and he has yet to cement his presidential legacy the way that, say, Abraham Lincoln has.

While most Americans will be watching what the Obama administration does domestically, I’m keeping a much closer tab on what it does with foreign policy: in particular, whether the Pentagon or the State Department will have a prominent role in Africa Command, an operation, established in 2007, that both departments have contributed considerable resources, staff and time building out at a U.S. base in Stuttgart, Germany. AFRICOM, as its better known, is no conspiracy. It is a seldom-discussed development, and as a member of the media I believe the only reason it is so is that most U.S. media outlets and the populace are blind to understanding the world has been a village for quite some time.

I know this as fact because I have visited several villages in Tanzania, East Africa, in 2007. I can say unequivocally that being the son of a Kenyan father gives Obama an automatic advantage going forward. He has shown he can connect to the people by the virtue of being a superb listener.

Now it’s up to U.S. citizens, permanent residents — and even those here illegally, whether we like it or not — to apply ourselves to get this country on the right footing on the world stage.

If we don’t do it for ourselves, we need to do it for the fallen veterans like Grangerhill.

 Slav Kanyba