Here is my take on Barack Obama and the Reverend Wright: most people and especially Obama partisans, have missed the point.
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It seems we are about to embark on a long overdue “dialog on race”…
I believe that, fundamentally, we don’t want to talk about it. Some of us like to rant about it, for sure, but if the rest of us actually talked about it calmly and rationally we would steal their spotlight. And really, it would be uncomfortable. Americans really aren’t used to being uncomfortable. We will go to any lengths — even selling our own liberty — to avoid it.
It has long been my contention that the first African American President and/or the first female President in America will be a Republican, for the simple reason that minorities and women who work their way up to levels of prominence in the Republican party tend to be there for reasons concerned with general economic growth, individual liberty, and social stability. Whether you think those concerns — and resulting platforms — are good or bad, they tend to be concerns and platforms that appeal to a broad centrist populace.
Which way do you want it? Opportunity comes with risk; security impedes opportunity. If you want creditors to give people opportunity you can’t blame them for enabling risk-taking. If you want them to prevent risk-taking you can’t blame them for denying opportunity.
I agree that the school system has probably failed them, but not by refusing to grant them a diploma; rather it has failed them by insisting that they are through with high-school merely because they have served their time and despite the fact that they can’t read and write English well enough to pass the MCAS exam. Justice would demand not an immediate – and meaningless – diploma but the opportunity for another year of intensive English instruction to overcome their deficiencies, followed by a well-earned and meaningful diploma which signified that they had, in fact, successfully completed the entirety of the high-school curriculum.
This comes back to the fundamental questions that are rarely addressed in any straightforward way: Who should we accept as immigrants? Who should we reject? What commitments, to civil behavior and to our national best interest, ought we require of those we accept? And what commitments, to civil behavior, to our national best interest, and to duty to our society and respect for our culture, ought we demand of those who would claim citizenship in our nation?
I found in Ted Rall’s editorial cartoon (Diversity Without Democracy, 28 Dec) a refreshingly frank self-exposure of the narrow-minded bigotry behind the modern ‘liberal’ conception of ‘diversity’. As Rall so clearly communicated diversity requires inclusion of only the right kind of blacks or the right kind of hispanics or the right kind of women, with the obvious implication that anyone politically ‘conservative’ (whatever that means in this era of ‘big tent’ politics) cannot possibly be ‘black enough’ or ‘hispanic enough’ or ‘woman enough’ really to be considered ‘diverse’.
The issue of abortion is once again forming the backdrop for the political show of our election cycle. And, as for the last thirty years, it is the bogeyman in the shadows, obsession of the few, ignored by the many until it is needed by politicians to frighten voters when they seem to be happy with the opposition. Abortion is universally recognized as divisive and intractable, a subject to be used for advantage among partisans but avoided in polite company, a fuse you can light but cannot control.
The partisan wrangling over whether or not to allow the census bureau to supplement the traditional head-count method (’actual enumeration’) with statistically-derived estimates for the expected under-count in the 2000 census was enlightening only in the way it illustrated our leaders’ ability to miss the point.
This was written the day after Paula Jones’ sexual-harassment suit against Bill Clinton was thrown out of court by Judge Susan Webber Wright, and shortly after Gloria Steinem, Ellen Goodman Molly Ivins, and several other women known for their traditional support of feminist causes and attacks on male piggishness had written columns explaining why Paula Jones was not a victim of sexual harassment. I believe Judge Wright (and the others) was correct on the law; that, to me, is more disheartening than if she had been wrong.