The Mental Masturbator

Barack Obama is Amazing

I just read the full text of Barack Obama’s “special speech on race.” I had to read it, not listen, because I’m at work. I’ll listen to it later just to hear his most-likely great delivery but the words themselves are very good. This kind of speech is exactly what he needs to be doing more of. Instead of attacking Hillary Clinton, this speech really demonstrates his ability to be a uniter. It’s intelligent, thoughtful, and right-on. Instead of denouncing one of his mentors and throwing him under the bus, he tries to clearly explain the racial divide in this country that has lead to this whole situation. It’s not the smartest political move by conventional wisdom, but it may work in today’s world. In today’s world people can go on youtube and watch the whole speech instead of just having it distilled to sound bites. Of course it will be distilled to sound bites. To wit: CNN’s headline, “Obama: Constitution ’stained by sin of slavery’.” This is why I hate old media, especially CNN. I mean he did say that, and it’s true by the way, but distilling his entire speech into that one sentence is very misrepresentative of his remarks. It makes him seem like an angry black man, much like the Rev. Wright the media’s been criticizing all week.

Anyway, let me now do my own blog version of sound-biting the speech. Let’s start at the top, with the constitution remark:

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

So CNN took that and got one sentence out of it. I read that a see a lot of sense. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery (of course he’s forgetting the other original sin of this nation: genocide. But I’ll let that one slide). Yet the document itself held all the answers; that we are all equal, and have rights to freedom and liberty. It’s just that at first “people” or “men” were categorized as “white men.” If you weren’t white, or a man, in those days you weren’t really a person as far as the government was concerned. So yes, the constitution was stained by this hypocrisy and sin. Fortunately over the years we’ve come closer to the ideals laid out in our founding documents. I’d stress the word “closer” in that sentence because we’re still a long way off, and unfortunately at the moment I’d say we’re regressing. But I digress, back to the speech:

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America.

Obama knows we’re not there yet, and he wants to help bring us closer. Continuing, regarding the Reverend Wright:

And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

He’s trying to make a point that should be simple to any rational adult: people are complex. Someone can have good qualities and be your friend, or even your mentor, and you can still disagree with them when they make stupid hyperbolic statements. Do we have to agree politically with everyone we associate with? I sure hope not. My boss is a Republican but does that mean I should never listen to him? Or that he can’t give me good career or family advice? Of course it doesn’t. This reminds me of a Walt Whitman quote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) ” We all contain multitudes. Is it somewhat contradictory for Obama to associate with this man? Perhaps, but even if it is, so what? People are not perfect, they contain multitudes. To judge Obama and Rev. Wright based on a few lines taken out of context is absurd. To wit:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

He can’t abandon this man, even if the best political choice is to drop him like a hot potato, any more than he can abandon his loving but perhaps mildly racist grandmother. Sometimes important people in your life can be a little nutty. That’s just the way things are. They are a part of this country, and this world, and unfortunately this country is a little racist. We can work to change that but pretending it’s a small problem and abandoning those of us who make stupid comments is not the way to fix the problem. He goes on to address the source of this anger in the black community:

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

Years of segregation and legal discrimination have certainly left their mark. And those days are in our very recent past. Plus there’s the illegal discrimination that’s rampant today. Obama addressed all of this, and also, true to his uniter identity, he addressed the white anger that also exists in this country:

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

He’s bringing up that fact that class can often times be an as-big or bigger issue than race. But he’s also just being amazing. So few politicians will go anywhere near these issues, yet he confronts them with gusto. He’s saying “Black people have problems with this country and they’re legit. So do white people. Let’s realize we’re all in the same boat, we’re all imperfect, and let work on that imperfection. Let’s bring ourselves towards a more perfect union.” And he’s right. He continues, now addressing the way media and politics is run is this country:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

He’s amazing. What he’s saying needs to be said. And did you notice how he let Clinton of the hook for the Ferraro thing? He doesn’t want to get bogged down in this kind of bullshit. He sums his ideals up thusly:

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

We need what all the world’s great religions demand. He’s so right. Just like the American constitution most of the worlds major religions have good ideals. They preach peace and tolerance, forgiveness and love. And yet they are tarnished by the terrible things people do in their names, and the hypocrisies of most of their followers. We need to move closer to our ideals. We have good ideals. Obama is doing his best to lead the way, and it will be a terrible tragedy if we don’t listen to him. Have you ever seen a politician be so frank and straightforward on such sticky topics? Have you ever seen a politician be so dead on with all his points? have you ever seen a politician talk about ideals that are bigger than simple policies? Maybe some of you baby-boomers have but no one from my generation has. He is the man for this time and place. He can bring us closer to our professed ideas, and help us make ammends for the sins of the past. We need him. Without him we’re liable to tear ourselves apart.