In Two Black Americas, columnist Eugene Robinson makes an important observation: In a sense, then, the most striking measure of how far African Americans have come since 1968 isn’t the rise of Barack Obama. It’s the story of Stanley O’Neal. That’s …

This is going to be an instructive year for all.

Lessons learned: Wright – nursing a grievance. Obama – getting beyond this.

I was born forty-two years ago; I didn’t do anything to anyone.

So what? I was born 55 years ago and it wasn’t even in this country. So my record is even cleaner than yours. Big deal.

Fact is, we both live here, now. We get the benefit of what this country has become. Not only that — we live with others who also didn’t do anything to anyone except maybe get born with a particular genetic makeup, if you catch my drift.

If some want to sit with a hate poisoning your heart and mind and soul then they can go right ahead; I’ll just let them sit and stew – count me the heck out.

I hear you. Unfortunately, that rarely works whether we’re dealing with an aggrieved family member or the strangers that live among us. But then you’ve probably figured that out by now. We don’t have the luxury of being “left alone.” Our national motto is E Pluribus Unum which, roughly translated, means, “We’re all in this thing together.”

Dr. Rice is brilliant and I respect her, but the subject has been addressed at length.

Apparently, many others disagree.

And as to telling someone what they can and cannot say – who said I was censoring? I was censuring. I was saying it wasn’t acceptable behavior, and that I wouldn’t have dealings with a person who said those things. You can say them all you want, but you don’t get to do so uncriticized. I don’t hang with people who repeat Nazi slogans, why would I hang with someone who says the same thing, only swapping the cast around? Please, get real.

Dr. Rice is brilliant and I respect her, but the subject has been addressed at length. Perhaps you ought to read this:

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/al16/speeches/lincoln2.htm

With respect to Lou Dobbs – please do not compare me to that cheap Father Coughlin imitation. That’s a direct insult.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin

Says you.

Condi Rice, bless her heart, gets it right when she says, the U.S. “still has trouble dealing with race because of a national ‘birth defect’ that denied black Americans the opportunities given to whites at the country’s very founding.” She added that this “birth defect” makes it “hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today.”

It isn’t easy to talk about; and telling someone what they can — and can’t — say makes it even harder.

But let me guess: you probably agree with Lou Dobbs when he says he’s sick and tired of “cotton pickin” black leaders telling him how he can — and cannot — address the issue of race.

Seriously – where does it say anywhere that I have to tolerate that? Where does it say that I have to treat a person who speaks like that about me with anything but cold contempt? Why on earth would I help someone who stands there and damns me?

And there is no way I could ever vote for a man who sat there for twenty years listening to that verbal sewage and did nothing more than nod his head like a dashboard puppy.