Can Republicans heal our nation’s festering racial wounds?
Whatever one thinks of his embattled and often erratic presidency, President Obama remains unrivaled as an orator. And America’s first black president put both law enforcement and the African-American community on notice during his 40-minute address at Tuesday’s memorial service for five Dallas police officers slain by a Black Lives Matter sympathizer bent on cold-blooded murder during an otherwise peaceful protest regarding, ironically, police use of deadly force nationwide.
At one point, the president correctly challenged police departments across our land to strategically battle the plague of black lives lost at the hands of errant cops, most recently in Minnesota and Louisiana. At another, he pointedly reminded Black Lives Matter protesters that they all too conveniently overlook not only the perils that police face in their communities daily but also one societal burden after another dumped on the cops. Dallas Police Chief David Brown, who is also black, made the same point earlier regarding everything from mental health to loose dogs.
Yet Obama acknowledged a sad reality that condemns not only our elected leaders but also those of us who repeatedly ratify and re-elect them: “I have spoken at too many memorials during the course of this presidency. I’ve hugged too many families who have lost a loved one to senseless violence. And I’ve seen how a spirit of unity, born of tragedy, can gradually dissipate, overtaken by the return to business as usual, by inertia and old habits and expediency. I see how easily we slip back into our old notions because they’re comfortable, we’re used to them.”
Almost exactly 24 hours later, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican and former judge who shared the stage in Dallas with the president, was back in Washington talking with the Texas press by phone when one of us asked what the Senate’s distinguished second-in-command was doing to answer the president’s impassioned plea for action at the memorial service. Cornyn said he had introduced a bill to make killing a police officer a federal crime.
Read more: http://www.wacotrib.com/opinion/columns/bill_whitaker/bill-whitaker-can-republicans-heal-our-nation-s-festering-racial/article_75df903a-12b9-5009-94ba-327a186f00fe.html (Waco Herald-Tribune)
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I wonder that this guy's DU name is... 
Thomas Justice
If you want the GOP to be a leader in racial healing and understanding, then who are you going to nominate for president? It sure can't be Donald Trump!
Like · Reply · 16 hrs · Edited
except that it is also tragic. 
No more racial wounds if there are only white people left, right? I'm sure a few Rethugs have wet dreams about that kind of a United States.
