My grandfather, who I never knew, was on the school board of a small town in Mississippi when the schools were desegregated. He had life long friends refuse to speak to him because he was integrating schools. He had folks come to his house on clan business, not in full garb mind you but it was clear why they were there.
My father put together a project for Martin Luther King Day a few years ago. It was truely a sight to see. It honored, not just the man, but the ideas and principles he epitomized. After it was over an African American woman, a woman who when she married her white husband was actually breaking the law in many states, came up to my father and said that this day, Martin Luther King Day, meant more to him than to anyone she has ever known.
My daughter will not grow up in the same world my grandfather did. She will not witness things my father has. She will grow up in a world where she will know anyone can achieve greatness. She will know the promise of America is, in fact, a reality. She will know a world in which this nation judged a man, not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. She will know a better world.
I kinda hate myself for weighing in on the election process so long before the actual election but something has been annoying me. If you watch the pundits you know that you hear the same names over and over- Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Romney, Giuliani. There are, however, many more people running for president. My problem is with the way the candidates are being covered and the amount of attention each candidate receives in the debates. It is as if the media has decided who should be running for president and chooses to ignore the others. While I concede it is highly unlikely that Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich will earn their party nomination, they, and all the other declared candidates, should be given the chance, especially when you consider some of the tier-two and tier-three candidates are worth listening to. David Brooks made a similar point on the NewsHour on November 16th.
DAVID BROOKS: I have total sympathy with that. We pay attention to this every day; this is what we do for a living. So we’re looking for the little minutia there. But I think for most people who look at it in a normal sense, tune in and out occasionally, I think a couple of things would leap out at you.
One, I always think almost — and especially last night — that Biden, Dodd and Richardson won the debate. I just think, if you didn’t know anything about these people, you saw those three, you’d say they’re pretty qualified to be president.
JIM LEHRER: Not on body language and one-liners, but on its face, huh?
DAVID BROOKS: I thought Richardson had an excellent answer on the illegal immigration issue. He’d actually done it. He knew the safety concerns. Biden had an excellent answer on Musharraf. He’d actually talked to Musharraf. He knows the issue better than any of them, believe me.
And so if you’re president, looking for somebody who actually knows what they’re doing, I think you would gravitate towards those guys.
Last night I watched An Inconvenient Truth. Yeah, I know. I’m a little behind the times. Anyway, there was something that struck me (beyond the whole “the earth is heating up and were all gonna die” thing). Al Gore will forever be linked, not to Bill Clinton, but to George W. Bush. The election of 2000 is the key moment in the political history of Al Gore, and for those of us on the left side of things, he will always be the man who should have been.
But this is what got me about the movie. Here is a film in which 95% of the dialogue is given by one man, and it’s riveting. A man considered dry, dull and boring talks for an hour and a half and it is amazing to watch. I then tried to imagine a movie in which George W. Bush talks for 90 minutes on his passion, whatever that might be. How bad would that movie be?! He couldn’t do it based on his personality alone. George W. Bush loses the charisma battle to Al Gore. Who would have guessed that? Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go recycle something.