Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Barack Obama’s speech was brilliant

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Daily Observer

Today’s Philadelphia Speech, as it may become known, is a milepost in American race relations, approaching the significance of the “I have a dream speech” delivered in 1963 by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Just about everything Obama said in the speech was exactly right.

The carefully crafted speech is a landmark because it is was built around the premise that America can change.

“The profound mistake of Reverend [Jeremiah] Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society,” Obama said. “It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old—is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.

“But what we know—what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

This is no small acknowledgment. Recognition of great progress is something that both “sides” need to hear. It must echo through black churches that are enslaved on a plantation of never-ending recriminations against past wrongs. It needs to be understood and not ridiculed by the gaggle of bug-eyed, conservative talk show hosts.


Read more in the Chicago Daily Observer

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I heard his speech and it was clever; insinuating that we're all racists like his frothing-at-the-mouth pastor -- even including his grandmother.

Sorry, I don't buy the injustice thing anymore. For almost 50 years we have been giving welfare, Medicaid,Pell grants, affirmative action to blacks to make up for the horrors that their ancestors endured 140 or more years ago.

Further, I and the majority of Americans not only never had slaves, we don't descend from slaveowners -- most of us came from poor, half-starving immigrants in the years following slavery and we had our own prejudices to overcome.

The present ills of the black community are due to the choices of its members; failure to study or graduate from high school or college, failure to work, failure to marry before having children, dealing drugs.

Obama's solutions are for more of what caused the destruction of the black family and community -- reliance on government handouts instead of individual morality and initiative.

Obama would raise taxes, to pour into the same failed institutions and risk ruining the economy on which we all depend.

He is mortally wounded by his long-term association with Wright and I can't help but believe he agrees with most of Wright's views or he would have fled from that awful "church" long ago.

If he were all white (not just the ignored half) and he belonged to a white power church with a racist pastor, he'd be gone so fast, we'd hardly know where he went.

Margaret

Anonymous said...

Please check out this link to a story about Obama's other odious connections to William Ayers, Weather Underground bomber and now Northwestern professor and Rashid Khalidi, terrorist fundraiser, and Columbia University professor:

http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?5c1672c5-872a-41d3-93ff-8567b49f5f1c

Margaret

DeSantis replies to Trump

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