OK, now I’m awestruck

The breathless adoration that people have been lavishing on Barack Obama is something I understand, since I felt it myself when I first heard him speak in a neighbor’s backyard in 2003.  But throughout this campaign, I’ve resisted and dismissed it.  To place a politician on a pedestal is, ultimately, anti-democratic and even idolatrous.

And yet I find myself getting the warm fuzzies for Barack again after today’s superb speech on race and religion.  Never before have I heard a politician treat this most touchy of issues with such a combination of boldness and finesse — simultaneously empathizing with Americans’ racial bitterness (whites and blacks alike) and challenging us to do better.  Who running for president would cite slavery as America’s “original sin” one moment and then acknowledging the “bitterness and bias” in the black community in the next?  Who running for president would concede that whites have developed an understandable “resentment” over racial issues while insisting that the legacy of legalized discrimination is real and requires progressive, structural changes in our society?  To date, no one but Barack.

This speech did, however, provide an echo of a past presidential campaign — that of Bobby Kennedy in 1968.  In that campaign, Kennedy was on his way to an event in Indianapolis when he learned that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated.  He ended up informing the mostly black crowd of King’s death and giving a brief, impromptu speech about the need for reconciliation:

For those of you who are black…you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.  We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization — black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.

Barack’s update of this sentiment:

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…Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.  This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

There is far more that’s worth reading in this speech.  I started skimming through it to find more excerpts to copy/paste into the Word document in which I’m writing this post, but the list has gotten too long.  So do yourself a favor and go read or watch the thing.

Whether you think Barack’s speechmaking abilities constitute hope or hype, there can be little doubt that much of the racial tension in this country is due to a lack of mutual understanding.  As a result, honest and respectful dialogue is necessary to make things better.  The speech Barack gave today won’t solve everything, but it is, undoubtedly, an inspiring and courageous start.