Grade Obama's speech on race & the moment when we see the other as us

yurbud

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Tue Mar-18-08 11:30 AM
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Poll question: Grade Obama's speech on race & the moment when we see the other as us

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. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together � unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction � towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton�s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I�ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world�s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners � an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

Link to advance copy:

http://blogs.rockymountainnews.com/denver/rockytalklive/archives/2008/03/obamas_speech_on_race_the_text.html

I only found one paragraph a bit off, but the rest represents the best of what most of us want America to be.

We have had so much stoking of fear and hatred in our society that when moments come when former enemies or those we thought of as other are recognized as us, it is truly a surprise but recognized as one of the most transcendent moments in life. They don't even give us the words for these moments that are equal to their significance, so the few we have sound like empty Hallmark platitudes.

I have felt this a couple of times.

One was the fall of the Berlin Wall and when the Russians stormed the White Palace after Soviet hardliners tried to undo Gorbachev's reforms. Suddenly instead of being the people who could kill us in a split second, they were us, people struggling for democracy and a better life.

I felt the same way when I watched the lack of action to help Hurricane Katrina victims. Those people in the squalid Superdome, scrambling on their roofs to escape the water, or floating face down dead were not poor, black refugees; they were us.

Ironically, though the media and our politicians try to stoke that fear to the point of violence that those who commit it try the rest of their lives to forget even as it haunts their dreams and tears their families apart, when these moments of feeling a part of others passes, we wonder where it went and when it will come again.

This is what the Obama moment represents to a lot of us. The rift between black and white people in America has lasted longer than the "War on Terror," the Cold War, and the existence of the United States as a country. I suppose it is only natural a self-inflicted wound so great can only be closed stages: freeing the slaves in the 1860s, guaranteeing the rights of citizenship in the 1960s, and perhaps now seeing an African American as our best hope for a leader after the most divisive and destructive president in our history.

Whatever quality of president he would be, it will be a little harder for the next merchant of fear and death to divide us after him.