Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

Let’s get to it!

I’m sure all 3 of you who monitor my blog have seen this already, but just in case, Barack Obama gave a speech yesterday — a bold, courageous, visionary speech:

We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle—as we did in the OJ trial—or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina—or as fodder for the nightly news.

We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.

We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.”

I found this shocking. The incarcerated now account for 1/99th of the US adult population. Even more frightening, 1 in 9 young black men (aged 20-34) is behind bars; among hispanic men, it’s 1 in 36.

The US has passed China as the worlds leading jailer.

I guess the prosecution was wise to boot me from the jury after all.

[via NYT]