Thought For The Week

Although I think, given that we're in the last leg of our presidential race, the following thought might be appropos for the next two months. Let me know what you think.

"But the American electorate doesn't do resumes. If it did, William Seward would have been elected president in 1860, when the country was in its greatest moment of crisis, not some lawyer from Illinois nobody had heard of(sound familiar?--italics mine), and a century later John Kennedy, a senator of arguably less substantive accomplishment than Obama, would not have defeated the more seasoned Richard Nixon."

--Steve Erickson,
Los Angeles Times,
August 31, 2008


On a slightly different note, though not altogether irrelevant, something to be considered regarding the date of August 28th in terms of the best and worst of our nation's history.

---On August 28th, 1955, Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago, was horribly murdered while visiting family in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

---On August 28th, 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his now famous, "I Have A Dream" speech, standing before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

---On August 28th, 2008, Senator Barack Obama, of Illinois, became the first African-American to accept his party's(Democratic, for those of you not paying attention) nomination for president.

In the words of that great black philosopher, Arsenio Hall, things that make you go, hmmmmm!!

We've made a lot of progress in the last 53 years in this country, standing on the shoulders of such people as Emmett Till and Dr. King, to see such a moment as what occurred at the Democratic Convention in Denver just a couple of weeks ago. Here's hoping we can continue to progress forward to what will be an inevitably historic and necessary moment in our nation's history. 'Nuff said!