The Reverend Wright homilies were very disturbing, no question.
I thought Barack Obama's speech, which finished just minutes ago, was brilliant, nuanced, healing and shows him to be incredibly worthy as a candidate. I hope America is interested enough in progress to embrace this man. We would be lucky, very lucky, to have him as a president. If you didn't see the speech, please seek it out.
His speech was brave, and touched on the minister and race in general with real wisdom, and hope for healing. He condemned the minister's words again; but he explained what he valued in him, and you have to be rigid and unbending not to understand what he said (and which he compared to his white grandmother, whom he loves greatly, but who sometimes has made racially divisive comments). He spoke of whites with racial resentments with empathy, and kept moving on to the need to find progress for all. (And his anti-corporation thoughts are pretty relevant, I'd say, right now? Are you sick of having your money disappear in value due to banks and financial houses using the money they invest as insane, addictive gambling adventures; and when the games then blow up in all our faces, the people who did the unwise gambling for short term profits then get 100 million dollar "parachutes"? Are we sick of that yet?)
I'm sorry -- I don't often get moved and inspired listening to a speaker. I think Barack Obama is brilliant, and he is a genuine healer. If we don't take our chances with him, we are doomed to more of this endless, idiot, non-constructive bickering deadlock that passes for governance in our stuck, stalled political landscape.
Can't write more. Off to the bus for my teaching job. I am grateful to have a job. (And I can't leave it if I want to keep my health insurance, can I?)
Bravo to the senator from Illinois.