Mustard and Relish

When I was in High School, I competed in the American Legion oratorical contests.  As a relatively good public speaker and writer - I loved it, for the most part.  Each year, you had to write on some passage of the US Constitution and its importance.  Each year, I wrote on the preamble to the Constitution.

I used to know it by heart, could recite it to anyone.  And so, you can imagine my thrill when Senator Obama, in his major speech on race and American politics, entitled the speech, "A More Perfect Union."  We MUST work for the general welfare of all of our citizens, even those that we took 300 years to fully recognize.

We do need this union to perfect itself, we need to deal with the hurt we face and have experienced through this country - because of gender/sex or race.

The line of mustard and relish made me bawl, however - I certainly grew up poor and when the Welfare Reform act kicked my mother and I off of welfare and our food stamps ran out, we ate whatever we could.  Sharing a 50 cents hamburger from McDonalds made me feel like I was normal as I ate at McDonalds AND gave me a night's dinner.  It's with this - with the weight of my family and ancestors on my back that I volunteer and give to his campaign, to make America More Perfect for all its citizens.

I urge you to find this speech online.  If a text becomes available or video, I'll link it in this diary.

Some quotes from today:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.  I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.  The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.  That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change.  But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.