Of course Joe Scarborough won't think so. Nor will the other talking heads of the media and their managers for whom the status quo has been very lucrative; those who think John McCain should be our next president.
But if this is the opening salvo in a conversation about race and religion that is long overdue, then Barack Obama has, if you'll excuse my all-over-the-place metaphors, not just stormed the Bastille but walked in calmly with his head held high and handed a list of demands to King Louis XVI, and said
"Now it's up to you."[text deleted because Melina posted it too,
up here.]
And if you don't have tears in your eyes after reading that speech, you ain't fucking human. Imagine being a black man whose own grandmother was afraid of black men. We all walk around with our family baggage. God knows I've revealed enough of mine in this space. But this man, this Senator from Chicago, and his family, are like the living embodiment of hundreds of years of history. We've spent my entire lifetime talking around the edges of racism -- from liberals who swear they're not racist but still have to remember NOT to clutch their handbags tighter when the black messenger enters the elevator to politicians like Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush and Jesse Helms scoring cheap political points out of "welfare queens", Willie Horton, and white hands crumpling a piece of paper after their owner finds out that a black guy got the job to which HE was entitled.
But this man has a very real shot at being our next president. Today he's offered himself up as the conduit by which the boils of our checkered racial history can finally be lanced; in the pursuit of a world in which it really and truly, finally, no longer matters.
I think that's an offer worth taking.
(UPDATE:
Sully nails it. Again. He really has to stop this or else become the next
John Cole and join the other side.)
Labels: Barack Obama