Where we go from here
Colbert King has an excellent defense of Barack Obama and his loyalty to his reverend, Jeremiah Wright, in today's Washington Post.
Why Obama Stands With His Church
I have to say, how refreshing to be having an honest, substantive conversation of something of importance in this campaign.
These racial issues that Colbert King describes, have everything to do with why I was a liberal for the great majority of my life. This was the work that inspired me. To bridge this divide. It is an inspiration that's been spoiled by a lot of hateful, nasty shitheads who have decided that healing around these issues is less important than scoring political points that get us a program, here, a public rebuke, there that doesn't really get to the heart of why this issue of race is so difficult and painful for people. And how we move on.
It's good to have all this difference aired out. For people to be honest about where they're coming from rather than suffocated under all of the hypersensitivity and political correctness and, generally, the covers of polite society that usually surrounds this issue. People need to get honest about their attitudes - pretty and ugly - around this issue, like so many other issues, so that people can start finding some genuine closure and resolution of the various pains and resentments around race in America and the world.
Because, eventually, we have to get to the place of, "Where do we go from here?"
And if the answer to that question, from all sides, is, "Remain stuck in the grief and resentment," then things aren't going anywhere, for real. We shouldn't confuse policies meant to appease that sense of grief and resentment with real progress.
Real progress will only happen when we start to talk about this stuff, honestly, to deal with it in our hearts, to let go of the defenses for all of the pain and guilt and resentment and all of the bullshit that keeps us from connecting and understanding the experiences of one another more genuinely and with more genuine compassion and concern.
This is what all that hatred has meant and threatens to shut down. That's why it's so poisonous. Because it blocks our ability to find the only real healing and resolution of these issues that is honestly available.
This very much takes me back to my race dialogue work in grad school. Having people talk about this thorniest of issues in a small room where people want to find some resolution, but where anger and resentment boil over in a way that obscures any real resolution or honest conversation - the very likely reason that we do not talk about issues of religion, sex, and politics, in this country and many countries, as well, by the way - is a really difficult thing to navigate when you care, genuinely, about having a more honest conversation. And the nice byproduct of all of this controversy is the beginnings of a more honest race conversation - and more substantive anything conversation - than we've had in a long time. It's been somewhat refreshing.
The denigration of that kind of discussion and thought is what has been fucking everything up since 9/11 or so. The attitude that the only thing that matters is "what action I take," which essentially translates as, "It's too hard for my brain to think about what options, perspective, ideas, and otherwise that we might consider on this issue and so I'd rather just assume I'm right and move on that, even if I'm not, which, frequently, is clearly true, whether I like to admit that or not."
This has been the pretension of the Hillary Clinton campaign that has driven me up a fucking wall. The fact that I act without more thoughtfulness or, worse, that I fail to take the thought and engagement seriously enough to even articulate a dissenting or constructive view for fear of pissing off voters with all that stinkin' thinkin', is evidence of my experience with just being in the room like a coatrack, whether my contributions have actually been helpful or constructive or critical or not. It's the Strong Thermond philosophy of public service: even if I've been terribly wrong on many important issues in my career, the fact that I've been in the thick of it, wrong or not, is some kind of evidence of my superior wisdom. I mean, how much bullshit do we have to live through in American politics. Not that much, I say.
Anyway. Having a more substantive conversation about anything is a step forward, nevertheless something as difficult as race in America.
It's been a refreshing departure from an otherwise cowardly and regressive period where we've run away from such difficult conversations and otherwise denigrated them because we're too fuckin' full of ourselves to think that there is any more that we might have to learn and any direction for growth. Which is really when everyone should say to us, "You really don't have much to say of worth on this matter, do you?" Which, for any decent, humble person would have them sit down and think a little bit about what they might have to learn and maybe engage people who think different from them.
And that is where real progress is going to come from, on this issue and so many other issues.
Martin Luther King told us it was so. Remember. He said that we must operate out of love and prick the conscience of our neighbor. He knew that racism was not going to be rooted out with the Voting Rights Act or any act, for that matter. Because how could it, if you were someone like King who took the time to actually think where racism lies and how it was going to be rooted out and what we were going to do with this or any other serious issue we faced.
Laws don't change people. At best, they corral them. And, often, the don't even do that.
People change people, more often than not. And, ultimately, people change themselves or they don't. And that is just the fact, jack.
I think this is a good start. Now we've got work to do in the form of more discussion and thought and reflection.
But it's not a bad place to begin.
