All he has is speeches.

[MessiahRp]

reposted from my blog, American Politik

http://usapolitik.blogspot.com/2008/03/all-he-has-is-speech.html

I have on several occasions posted great speeches in American history including some from Kennedy and Eisenhower. I had planned on posting the infamous MLK "I Have a Dream" speech as well.

Barack Obama made a great speech today that while current already stands up to the best campaign speeches ever made and addresses one of the most difficult topics that any American Presidential Candidate has ever addressed prior to being elected in such a position.

Regardless of your take on the significance of the speech (and there were haters on TV today like Tucker Carlson, Dan Abrams, Joe Watkins and yes Rush Limbaugh who was ridiculous about it) the vast majority of pundits and writers immediately proclaimed how important and how well delivered the speech was.

Allow me to use his speech to expand the context to a larger topic.

We constantly are bombarded with the whole "post-9/11 world" commentary when we try to present hope as an option. It is an easy response to somehow explain why we must be perpetual cynics and militarily aggressive towards friend and foe from now on.

It is an obvious oversimplication Americans make because in facing reality we must face our own roles in the motivation for an attack on America. If we say to ourselves, "they hate us for our freedoms" that sounds a lot simpler than saying, "they hate us because we have meddled with their freedoms".

In continuing our ignorance towards our role in negative events we never seem to change the course of the discourse and thus we create divisions in America. Divisions that shall never heal because over time those pre-dispositions that were created based on emotional response and simplicity over fact have hardened into false concrete patriotism. Patriotism where America is never questioned and anyone who dare to delve into such a difficult to accept topic as the role of American interventionism are labeled traitors, treasonous, part of the 'Blame America First' crowd.

Our inside questioning of our role in our problems is but a tiny microcosm of the American attitude towards larger problems.

Race is one of these larger problems. Concrete divisions have formed from over 200 years of verbal, mental, emotional and very physical conflicts on the role of race in our culture.

Just as we would like to use a positive light and give nothing but blanket support to America in justifying all of her actions, we want there to be a positive light in terms of racial relations in America. Unfortunately our best wishes that racism would just go away haven't come true due to our own cemented attitudes. Here are some generalizations, while not completely true, that have helped create negative perceptions amongst the different groups.

For a lot of White America, blacks are gaming the system. Welfare was a scam in which black women would just have child after child to collect more free money and benefits from the government. Affirmative Action was set up to give undeserving blacks jobs that more qualified Whites deserved. Blacks statistically were more likely to be in prison than Whites so they are all rap listening, gang member thug criminals who deserve their fates. And when reparations were brought up it was all a scam to steal even more money from the hard working whites (in contrast to lazy blacks).

Not to mention Whites feel threatened by the inevitability of their own soon-to-be minority status due to the rise of population of hispanics in America (which explains such negativity towards immigration but this is a different issue altogether).

There's a ton of generalization in these paragraphs. Unfair stereotyping is part of how America works.

For Black America the system is set up to keep them down. Their ancestors were brought here as slaves, raped and tortured in their own right and they had to fight for another 100 years after the Civil War just to reach a modicum of racial equality. Whites want to keep blacks poor and white congressmen target social programs that would most help poor blacks when they need it most. Their schools are given less money and the inner city is allowed to rot while all the development projects are set up for the White Suburbs.

Hurricane Katrina had a direct impact on a large black community and it was clear that Bush and other White politicans manipulated the system to take public housing that was perfectly fine from Blacks to give to big business friends. All the while poisoned, toxic FEMA trailers were given to those displaced Blacks. A White police force and justice system works against blacks (Rodney King, etc) while it protects rich White folk. One only need to look at the sentences of crack users versus the much higher cost cocaine equivalent.

There are a lot of truths and untruths in both paragraphs. Either way these are attitudes cemented by years of arguing and mistrust. Simplified stereotyping is easier to do than addressing the difficulties of the situation.

So many times it is easier to brush off the opinion of those who oppose your own than to face your own factual shortcomings.

It is the American ego that believes we must never be wrong and never admit defeat. It is this reason that our history books are whitewashed to leave out American-made atrocities because we fear our children will not see America under the same blinded patriotism that comforts us as adults in the face of very real earned criticisms from native and foreign sources.

That same ego that allows George W. Bush to refuse to admit any mistakes when countless have been made under his watch or that allows Hillary Clinton to feel vindicated by not admitting the mistake of nor apologizing for her vote to authorize war in Iraq.

No matter the ideology, no matter the race, no matter the gender, no matter the topic the one American experience we all share is one where we have not faced our greatest challenge today.

That challenge, examining our own attitudes.

Whether it is our attitude towards how we handle foreign policy and if we can, like JFK, speak to those who oppose us with an open mind and empathy for their positions or it is our attitude towards people different from ourselves that we encounter on a daily basis be it different gender, race or sexual orientation, we have to begin to take a deeper examination of ourselves if we want to change for the better and make progress for the future.

And that is what this is all about. Future generations as well as our own. Do we want our children to continue to have division over gender or race or sexual orientation? Do we want them to pit one religion against another even in the face of uncertainty over the legitimacy of any of them? Do we want to teach our children intolerance of opinions differing from our own so that they cannot understand or deal with people of different cultures that disagree or clash with our own?

For many, many centuries in history such ignorance or blatant dismissal of the beliefs or opinions of others has created clashes of civilizations which has cost millions of people their lives. Dating back to the Roman Empire, through the Crusades, through the Civil War and even up to Hitler and beyond we have long been lacking in a serious understanding of our differences and confronting these differences in a calm, constructive manner that can draw a peaceful coexistence and a consensus amongst the parties.

This is in essence the specific idealism that drives liberals and progressives.

It is not an over-optimistic view or a pie in the sky dream, it is an easily achieved reality in which all it takes is the judgment to listen and take account of all the differing views on every issue.

Nobody believes that this is the end-all, be-all to conflict. That the whole world would be solved by this simple solution. Again that's a simplification that the cynical or warmongers choose to make to keep you from credibly making such a peaceful argument to the people.

If it were that simple there wouldn't have been broken treaties in the past and there would have never have been war. Many times in history there have been summits where the parties involved sat down and attempted to reach accord.

The difference is that the motivation in reaching such an accord must be pure. If you're sitting down to game your peers for what you can get out of them or are looking for lip service and nothing more than your path is set already and you know the future result of breaking the agreement.

When I listen to Barack Obama I hear this kind of judgment. The kind of open mind that can sway the pessimistic and make the real progressive changes that affect the attitudes of foreign leaders and foreign citizens towards us.

And ultimately I come back to the reason for Obama's speech. The fact that he is willing to take political risk to open up such a deep wound in America and discuss this from all points of view points to the fact that he will have such courage to discuss similar hard headed differences of opinions we have had with many of our rival nations.

Race is our great divide. Race relations have improved quite a bit over the past 50 years but there is still deep resentment and a lot of cemented attitudes based on stereotypes, innuendo and emotional reasoning. We use those attitudes to openly discriminate against one another and because of our self-justified reasoning for these beliefs, most of us don't even realize we are doing it. Without a doubt though, we are.

We have been waiting for someone to bring both sides together to open this topic up for discussion. The discussion can create more depth in our understanding of one another and actually could begin to bring about a stronger trust and accord between blacks and whites.

Will this change overnight? Nobody including Obama believes it will. But it's finally a step in the right direction.

If we elect Obama this November, I believe we will be making that step in the right direction. He won't eradicate anti-American sentiment overnight. The damage Bush has done to our image in the Middle East and in the World may take generations to overcome. But he can take the deep divisions between us and our enemies and bring them out in the open. He can use an open mind, an attentive ear and solid judgment to come to agreements that bring us closer to accord with those who have viewed us as evil or the enemy.

In doing so we will have saved a lot of young soldiers their lives. Saved a lot of Middle Eastern citizens theirs. And hopefully put a lot of bomb manufacturers out of business.

All it takes is an open mind and judgment. It's no easy feat but it seems finally we have the candidate who has the courage to take on difficult topics and broach them in a way that is fair-minded and open.

This is real change.

Let's stop talking about some comments by a minister and start talking about what truly matters. Change in every aspect of America.

Obama is that change.

-Rp

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. What was the purpose of that speech? Why did he give it today?

[MessiahRp]

3. Sure he addressed something he had received heat over...

What took political courage was his willingness to open the wound up so far to bring all the issues we as Americans have with each other out onto the table to discuss them openly and help come to a better understanding of each other. We should not only applaud what kind of impact that can have domestically with our own divisions but how that kind of willingness to be open minded and listen will be an incredible asset as our Commander in Chief and the leader of our foreign policy direction across the world.

Rp

[pointsoflight]

5. Real simple, it was a call for Americans to come together.

And before you even say it was just politics, that's B.S. The speech he gave today was NOT politically expedient. If his intent was solely to win the election, he would've distanced himself from Wright, not just Wright's statement. That would've be the easy way out. Instead, although he didn't ask for this debate--he took the opportunity to address the much bigger issue of racial divide in the country, and how it's time to move forward to a new era.

[housewolf]

2. Hear, Hear!

Very well written and thought out.

Thank you!

:toast:

:applause:

[TML]

4. Obama Has Speeches...

is like saying Wayne Gretzky had passing skills, Tony Gwynn had batting skills, and Pete Maravich had shooting skills. One day, people will wise up and realize this is an asset, not a target for derision.

Great post.

[Demeter]

6. After 8 years of Bush, Anybody Sounds Competent

But Obama sounds like a Genius!