Obama's Sunday Hearing Loss

Friends and Family,

Happy Easter today to those who observe it, and an early Passover greeting to the rest of you!

From DAY ONE of his substance-less campaign I have termed the junior Senator from Illinois a cynical, lurking, self-aggrandizing political hack and a fraud. Senator Obama has, I have said, very good hearing when it comes to what he thinks people want to hear. It appears, though, that he goes deaf on Sunday.

Several of you know me from my youth as an aggressive civil rights advocate, I remain so inclined in my life as I have passed the 9th hole on this great fairway of life. I remain a dedicated feminist--equal pay for equal work as a base-line--(despite the treatment men get in divorce court). I continue to think we as a nation should do a better job in erasing the lines of ethnic caste in our society, without throwing our borders open and without losing our National Identity in the process.

But I draw the line in society and politics at racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and totalitarianism.

Back to Senator Obama.

Between the lines of what people are calling is "eloquent" and "beautiful" speech in answering his silence to the racist rants of his pastor of twenty years is an avowal of the right of Blacks to savage White people because of the fact of our Slavery past and the difficult integration of Blacks in our society in the post-Slavery period.

Interesting.

I put my mind to the issue, and came up with a somewhat, if not perfectly, analogous situation. It is entirely fictitious. Nothing in the below "Saga" is even remotely true of any living or dead person.

The Saga of Senator John J. Hawke
Let's talk about a mythic Senator, Senator John J. Hawke, (R-Kansas), who is running away from Mip Romney with the Republican nomination for President. Senator Hawke is a graduate of Princeton, where he studied Foreign Policy and History. He is 45 years old, has two young adults in college, and is married to his high school sweetheart of 20 years. He is a compassionate conservative--which brings him into conflict with the likes of Limbaugh, Levine, and Kudlow on Fox Radio--but he is in good company with Senator's Lieberman and McCain. He can work across the aisle. He is a born-again Baptist, and his pastor has been continuously the Reverend Fred Steelman, at the large, ornate "Christ the Messenger Church" -- not far from Kansas City. Senator Hawke and family have hardly ever missed a sermon; Reverend Steelman is on Hawke's election team.

Some whispers begin to stir, though, as the campaign season draws to a close. A breath becomes a gust, then a gale, then a tornado--Steelman's personal website is laced with White-Supremacist doctrine, and anti-Semitic dogma is unavoidable, and obvious!

In the wake of this brewing scandal, former members of the Christ the Messenger Church come forward to relate how Reverend Steelman regularly included his racism and anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiments. "The Powerful Jew Lobby" is one of his repeated themes, as is the "perils of White people" in the face of the advance of Asian/Hispanic/Black ethnicity in the United States. He has even praised the KKK as "protectors of our women's chastity" in an age gone by.

Soon Steelman withdraws from the Hawke campaign team; Hawke remains silent. The press bangs the drum for comment, and that day comes when the Senator from Kansas must address his attendance at sermons over two decades in which Blacks and other people of color, and Jews of all stripe, are regularly savaged from the pulpit in the place of his Sunday worship.

*****PAUSE*****
Be honest with me, now. If this scenario were a true one, would ANY OF US care to hear one word from Senator Hawke? Someone who has stood silently by the torrential anti-Semitic and White-supremacist doctrine of his pastor for two decades? I would not be receptive, but some people call me cranky....
*****RESUME*****

Hawke gives the speech of his life, and in it reveals that his grandmother (mother's mother) was not only of the Hebrew faith, but was, in fact, "a typical Jew". She would call him a "mischling", that is, she was prejudiced against him because of his mixed heritage, and this left him scarred. He talked about how his father lost his livelihood when a (Jewish) union activist targeted his sweatshop for organization, and the lucrative business of 1,000 employees, many of them Latino and Black, shut down in job action that cost Hawke's father his marketplace niche. He never recovered from the loss, and died an angry, bitter man some years later, without ever meeting his grandchildren. Hawke had to work three different jobs to help support his prostrate father and family, winning a full scholarship to Princeton on merit.

Hawke wipes a tear, hugs his wife, and asks for our forgiveness for listening to a message of hate for twenty years without once speaking out against it.

And he asks for your continued support in his run for the nomination of his party and the Presidency of the United States.

*****FIN******
How many of you could give this man your political support? Would this man even have a political career outside of his home state, or even home town, if this had truly occured? I doubt it. Would the New York Times EVER stop writing about this debacle and scandal? I'd say it would run for years. Would the Republican Party ever recover? Again, this wound would hobble the Republican Party certainly for an election cycle or two.

In our lives and times, we must draw the line. Politicians mustn't be squeaky clean, in my opinion. But someone who will not fight against racism, sexism, anti-Semitism or totalitarianism where ever they find it, is not fit to lead.

Look, the part of me that recognizes my Whiteness doesn't want Caucasian-ness to disappear. I want my kind and where I come from to continue on our earth. As I want those of us around me who would live in peace with me to continue, all of us, with love and mutual, selfless support, regardless of our ethnicity or faith. But to dwell upon my Whiteness and have it a focal point in my life would make me a racist.

Would it not?

If I were black, and I were in fact the junior Senator from Illinois, I should realize that my speech and twenty years of silence in the face of constant White-bashing in the HOUSE OF GOD is proof positive of lurking racism in my makeup. I should step away and correct it.

Immediately.




James A. Bridge