Obama and with him others give voice to generations

Spiritual Politics at the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the
Study of Religion in Public Policy at Trinity College found two clusters of media reaction to Sen. Barack Obama's speech:

• Those which saw it as exemplary of a presidentail candidate, even paralleling JFK's in 1960.


• Those which saw it as doing too little to condemn Rev. Jeremiah Wright's comments, even finding guilt by association.

Most media reactions were pabulum when compared to North Carolina blogger Frink, who found in Obama's oration a defiance of racism which paralleled his own grandfather's covert defiance of the KKK more than a century earlier in Columbus County.

His was the authentic voice of generations and community responding with affirmation to Obama's authentic speech about the generations and community embodied in his campaign for the presidency.

In Frink's reaction and others like it, even those felt but not given voice, we find the towering possibilities of this election to heal and grow once more toward a more perfect union.

Obama's path to a more perfect union

During Barack Obama's speech, my thoughts returned to my late friends in Saint Paul, N.C., who made the long journey from our common heritage of racial bigotry to support of George McGovern's bid for the presidency and advocacy of equal rights.

Lost in those memories, I forgot for a time that Obama's epochal speech on American racial division was occasioned by Obama's handling of his relationship with his own pastor.

About that precipitating issue, Atlantic editor Andrew Sullivan anticipated Obama when he wrote:

Faith is not like a policy check-list; it's an unending engagement with a community and a set of truths. Any church, moreover, is its membership, all of it. And every Christian community speaks to a larger, eternal community of saints that redeems us even as we falter and even betray the Gospels.

Without attempting the prophetic voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Obama nonetheless told us that community, family and our love for one another often bring us all to accept from one another speech and behavior we do not embrace in ourselves. That behavior may be in a grandmother, someone else, or even a minister.

In the finest tradition of American political rhetoric he went on to enjoin us to transcend our own current differences, to push aside the chorus of appeals to bigotry and to walk a little farther down the long American path to a more perfect union.

I cannot say him nay.

Addendum: Here are the text and video of Barack Obama's Tuesday, March 18, 2008, speech.