As the Democratic primary continues to drag on I am reminded of a book I read a long time ago. The name of the book was, "All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten". Obviously the candidates and their campaigns didn't read the book, if they had maybe there would be a lot less of this incessant snipping that has overtaken the issues in this campaign. In the book the author states that the most important lessons in life the Golden Rule, honesty, clean up your own mess, and say you're sorry when you hurt somebody he learned in kindergarten. These valuable lessons would be a welcome change on the campaign trail. For many of us, kindergarten represented our first foray into the social experiment we call society. It was important to learn the ground rules of interpersonal communications to learn how to navigate the many pitfalls that await those who don't learn them.
I just have one question for the architects and proponents of this global war on terror, how will we know when it is over? Who will sign the treaty papers for the terrorists? Will it be Osama bin Laden? The truth is that there will be no surrender ceremony because we are not really fighting a war. We are not fighting a war in the conventional sense. It is sort of like the "war on poverty" or the "war on drugs" there is no identifiable point of success or failure. Because our enemy is undefined and really impossible to defeat there are no "benchmarks" to gauge our successes or failures. We have been fighting the war on poverty since 1964 and poverty has not surrendered yet. We have been fighting the war on drugs since 1972 and drugs have yet to surrender. In fact in both case we have actually lost ground to both enemies. The problem with declaring war on these types of enemies is that you become entrenched in the mindset of the original declaration.
Thank God for the Iraqis, if it were not for them the MSM would have allowed John McCain to put the Iraq War in his pocket and run with it. Fortunately the Iraqis have other thoughts and have reminded the American public that yes there is still a war going on in Iraq. Despite all the hype and the John McCain "Mission Accomplished" banners, any peace in Iraq has very little to do with us and the surge and is dependent on the Iraqi people. It is unfortunate that it takes bodies and bloodshed to get the MSM's attention, but of course when St. John declares peace is at hand who in the MSM is going to argue.
As someone who lives in a neighborhood going through gentrification I am often at odds with my belief that poor people need to be integrated into mixed income neighborhoods and the fact that many poor people trash the neighborhoods they live in. We must develop a method of removing poor people from the isolation of ghetto existence, while at the same time protecting the values of the properties we relocate them to. Unfortunately because of personal decisions, lifestyles, and circumstances many of our poorer citizens have lost either the desire or the ability to respect their environments. Many will say that this is due to our treatment of poor people and I would not disagree with this, but this does not help in creating situations that will allow them to escape the dangers of ghetto life.
As if things in America were not hard enough for blacks, what with Barack Obama having to explain and denounce his relationship with his "angry" black pastor to ease the fears of his white supporters. It is amazing to me how we allow and accept comments from whites without so much as a whimper, but let a black man say them and all hell breaks loose. It is this double standard and hypocrisy that created the "invisible" Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. I call him invisible because unfortunately for him he is too black to be white and too white to be black. He is lost in a false reality that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. He is a black man that hates black people, what a terrible place that must be.
Why is it that in America we always look for the easy and the convenient. We always want everything to fit into a nice neat box. That's right, no contemplative thought, no analyzing, just give it to me in a form that will not require a lot of work or thought on my part. It is a simple task to chalk up the Reverend Jeremiah Wright as some angry black lunatic who is going to single handedly destroy the Obamania tour. It is amazing to me how so many people blogging will write all these prose and essays extolling the virtues of the American electorate and how badly they want policy white papers and how hungry they are for detailed plans. When the truth of the matter, as the fall-out from Reverend Wright has once again displayed, is that the majority of voters could care less about timetables and figures. Not when there is some juicy story floating around about some crazy black man and his relationship to the leading Democratic Presidential contender.
Editorial columnist Bob Herbert of the New York Times wrote an interesting piece discussing the true cost of the Iraq War. According to a Nobel prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz and the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, Robert Hormats the Iraq War will cost at least 3 trillion dollars. This figure includes cost which are never reported by the media or discussed by politicians. The truth is that the cost of a war is more than the money spent on men and material, as if it were some business venture that can be tallied with a nice spreadsheet and budget. In today's world, war is packaged like a corporate enterprise complete with sanitized videos and reporting to make it more palatable to the disinterested masses.
Said Mr. Stiglitz: "Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits. The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself ... By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion." NY Times
In this country many of us equate strength with the lack of emotion. The strong one is the one who can endure life without feeling. The weak one is the one who shows their emotions and thus are banished to a life of disappointment and tragedy. With the introduction of the political narrative of Barack Obama there has been a lot of talk about the word hope. I don't ever recall this word being dissected to the degree that it has been during his unlikely run towards the White House. One would believe that no other politician has ever invoked the word in an election before. So what makes it so different today than say in 1992, when a young upstart politician challenged the status quo?
Why is it that when we encounter poor or homeless people they make us cringe? Why do we want to make them disappear into shelters or remove them out of our sights? Since the Reagan revolution we have instead of being at war against poverty, we have been at war with poor people. They litter our streets like so many abandoned cars at a salvage yard. Why has it been so easy to sell the false narrative that people are poor by choice and that if they would just work harder they wouldn't be poor? I think that our reactions to the poor says more about who we are than who they are. Let's face it there have been poor people throughout recorded history, so what's the big deal? The big deal is not that there are poor people, but that there are poor people we could help and don't.
Unlike many of my fellow bloggers, the MSM, and the talking-heads and pundits, I can admit when I am wrong. I have written and believed that whites when in the solitude of the voting booths would not be able to overcome centuries of racial history in America and actually be able to vote for a black man for President. Despite what the pollsters and campaign spokespersons were saying, the biggest question mark going into the primaries of Super Tuesday and beyond was would whites be willing to support Obama in the numbers that they were polling at? The truth be told no one knew the answer to that question and it created a lot of anxiety in the campaigns and in the rest of America. The answer at least among the Democrats in the primaries is a resounding yes.
Here is my question, can a person in America change their race or opt out of their racial classification? Can someone who is defined by others as black check another box on the questionnaire? The reason I ask this question is the events that happened over the last few weeks in the golf world concerning Tiger Woods. For those who don't know there was a major controversy when a Golf Channel anchorwoman, Kelly Tilghman made the comment that the best thing young golfers could do was to take Tiger Woods out in an alley and lynch him. The anchorwoman was suspended for two weeks. Then in an effort to sensationalize the issue and sell some magazines the vice-president and editor of Golfweek, Mr. Dave Seanor decided it would be a good idea to dramatize the issue with a picture of a noose on the cover. Mr. Seanor was immediately fired.
If there is one thing the New Hampshire primary should have taught us all is that polls are unreliable, especially this year. There are too many dynamics at play that cannot be gleaned from simple raw data. I have said from the outset that polls will be ineffective because by their nature they are ineffectual for determining what a person is really thinking.
The trouble with America today is that we are having a crisis of honesty. Many of us want to pretend we are somebody we are not. How many of us are willing to admit what is going on in the deep recesses of our minds and hearts? Too many of us want to be judged on what we say and not on what we do. The bottom line will be which group polled will be true to their numbers.
It is my honor to introduce Forgiven. I believe his thoughtful, reflective treatise speaks volumes. As I read it, so much of the information resonated within me. I hope you too will appreciate the missive and the message.
There is a common myth that runs through America, propagated by the wealthy for mass consumption. This myth has been one of the most dangerous and divisive instruments used against the American working class of all races. This myth has been a part of Americana from the beginning and continues today unabated for the most part and constantly being reinforced by the media, corporate America, and the talking heads. The myth is simply this: that if an individual will work hard, follow the rules, and be patient that they can be successful. The biggest determinate to a person's rise in this society is hard work and personal responsibility.
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