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Thursday, May 15, 2008
Good, because cruelty should have a price
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
from the AP…
LOS ANGELES — A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted a Missouri woman for her alleged role in perpetrating a hoax on the online social network MySpace against a 13-year-old neighbor who committed suicide.
Lori Drew of suburban St. Louis allegedly helped create a false-identity MySpace account to contact Megan Meier, who thought she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans. Josh didn’t exist.
Megan hanged herself at home in October 2006 after receiving cruel messages, including one stating the world would be better off without her.
Drew was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl.
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The “Long War” or “Forever War”?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Andrew Bacevich is a former U.S. Army officer, instructor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and veteran of both Vietnam and the first Gulf War. His son, who followed his father into the Army, was killed a year ago this week in combat in Iraq. Bacevich, now a professor at Boston University and has a very wise op-ed piece in today’s Los Angeles Times.
The key point is here:
“Meanwhile, the immediate danger to the American way of life comes not from terrorists but from our own adamant refusal to live within our means. American profligacy, not Islamic radicals, triggered the mortgage crisis that underlies our current economic distress…. We can either persist in our efforts to change the way (the Islamic world lives) — in which case the war of no exits will surely lead to bankruptcy and exhaustion. Or we can recognize the folly of generational war and choose instead to put our own house in order: curbing our appetites, paying our bills and ending our self-destructive dependency on foreign oil and foreign credit.”
Obama’s success suggests we can transcend race
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Race has been in the room since the beginning. It was there in Philadelphia, where the Founding Fathers debated slavery in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It is there now, two centuries later, still playing a central if sometimes hidden role in politics.
But in the election of 2008, the first in which a black person stands a reasonable chance of becoming president, the role of race will be far from hidden.
In ways large and small, the weeks and months ahead will test just how far we’ve come as a nation.
For some individuals, the answer will be not very far at all. In Marietta, for example, a tavern owner is proudly selling T-shirts depicting Barack Obama as a monkey holding a banana. Naturally, he professes to see nothing racist in the image.
Likewise, a few months ago a minor Republican Party official here in Georgia sent a mass e-mail to fellow party members and others featuring Photoshopped images of top Democrats.
In one, a bawling Chelsea Clinton is seen holding a T-shirt proclaiming “My mom is getting her ass kicked by a Negro,” as if there were some special shame in that.
In the second, Bill and Hillary are seen standing near a plantation house with a black-faced lawn jockey. The face on the lawn jockey is that of Obama.
Later, the official sent out an e-mail to apologize “if this offended anyone,” explaining that she had only forwarded an e-mail that she herself had received from many others.
“Please be assured that the 25 longtime conservative Republicans who have forwarded this to me are not at all racists,” she wrote.
No. Not at all. Why would anybody think that?
But you know what? Ugly as it might get, let’s draw this poison out. Let’s drag it into the open, where it can stand as concrete refutation of the claim that racism doesn’t really exist anymore. It remains real, it retains the power to warp lives and futures and souls, and you can see its handiwork throughout our society.
However, while we acknowledge that racial bias remains a powerful subcurrent in all aspects of American life, it’s also important not to confuse that subcurrent with the mainstream. The country is changing quickly, and for the better, and there is no stronger evidence of that transformation than Obama himself.
Early in the primary process, a lot of African-American voters and leaders were wary of Obama’s candidacy. They were not ready to believe that their fellow Americans might support a black candidate; they feared that his rejection would be their rejection as well.
So when Obama started surprising people with victories in Iowa and other states, some of his fellow black Americans were most surprised of all. That initial wariness has since been replaced by joy, with black voters turning out in record numbers for Obama.
However, that enthusiasm is about more than a chance for black Americans to vote for “one of their own.” This time, black Americans seem motivated to vote as much out of excitement about this country as about the candidate. They seem thrilled that the secret, often unspoken hopes they have nurtured for America and their place in it might actually come true someday, and that “someday” could even be today. They’re voting not just for Obama, but for America.
Seeing that hope realized does not, in the end, require that Barack Obama win the election. He may very well lose, just as fellow Democrats John Kerry and Al Gore lost before him for reasons other than their race. What matters will be how the campaign is run.
It would be a vast exaggeration to refer to the Republican Party as racist. However, it has certainly been willing to play on racial fear and resentment for political advantage, pushing that message just hard enough to have an effect without being obvious.
Against Obama, that will be a tricky thing to modulate. As we’ve seen, his very presence in the race will provoke some to excess, and if the GOP pushes things too far, or if it tolerates the worst instincts of those on its fringe, it risks a powerful backlash in Obama’s favor.
Because we’re just not that country anymore.
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