I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.


When I was still a boy, I went to visit my grandfather down on his small farm in Alabama.  It was my first visit to the deep south, back along red dirt roads shaded thick by black oaks.  My grandfather was a wonderful man.  Old school.  Southern baptist.  Carpenter.  Freemason.  Hunter.  He had a wonderful sense of humor and a stern, disciplinarian air about him that you dared not provoke.

Having grown up outside of the south, it was a very different experience for me.  The culture there is radically different in many ways than it is elsewhere in America.  There are places you can still go today in states like Alabama that look as if time passes there very slowly, maybe not at all.  My family cemetery is out there, deep in the woods and framed by a growth that is constantly encroaching and yet somehow seems to respect hallowed ground.  Many of the people there don't seem to know much or care much about many of the trappings of this modern life.  They've been doing things their way for a long time and it hasn't failed them yet.

As my family was getting ready to leave one day, I overheard my grandfather talking to a neighbor and some of the kin.  He had some very small cotton plants that lined the road up to his house and I could hear him say to the other men that he'd have to get a nigger to come pick the cotton.  They all laughed loudly.

I had never really heard that sort of thing before.  Not so plainly from grown, respected men.  My parents would never have allowed me to talk like that about another person.  You just didn't do it.  Sure, I heard all kinds of things in the schoolyard growing up as I'm sure most kids do, but this was a different sort of thing.  Though these men were laughing and it seemed to be a joke to them, I knew that my grandfather would not have said this sort of thing in different company.  He was not a cruel man in any sense of the word, but this joke was cruel and I knew it.

I don't know whether I can say that I've ever in my life heard a politician stand up in front of the nation and speak truth like Barack Obama spoke yesterday.  You can say his political back was against the wall and that's probably true, but he didn't have to do what he did.  He could have given the same kind of speech that a thousand politicians before him have given.  He could have equivocated.  He could have distanced himself.  He didn't do that.  Instead, he spoke some hard, honest truths to a country that desperately needs to hear what he had to say.

There is something that is taught very frequently in philosophies from the East that is usually overlooked in Western cultures.  The West has a good handle on duality.  Descartes gave us a big shove in that direction.  However, there is something that is taught in both buddhism and taoism that says that duality has a different nature.  To focus entirely on the contrast between two halves is to miss the point.  They are not one and not two.  This is the meaning of Obama's statement about his grandmother and his pastor alike.  Politics demands that he takes a "firm stand" and "denounce and reject", but this is so much bullshit and he has explained to us very clearly why this is so.  It is the same for both of these people as it was for my grandfather and indeed for each and every one of us.

I've been waiting for a long time for someone with the constitution to put aside political expedience and bear witness to principle.  I've been the cynic's cynic.  All politicians are evil.  None are to be trusted.  No matter what they say all they want is your complacency in the face of their power.

And yet, history shows us that there are times when someone shows up who transcends this pattern.  There are people who will rise that feel as we all do, that see what we see and feel what we feel, people who have not forgotten that there is something more to be strived for than mere power.  Power, like all things in this universe, is impermanent.  Empires fall.  What remains?

Principles transcend.  We live in a nation based on principles that were inspired by the Greeks some 2500 years ago.  Our philosophies, our religious traditions all have ancient seeds.  They come from halls and town squares, many of which have long since crumbled.  Principles remain intact, not gone or turned to dust but polished like a smooth stones by the tests of time.

And I imagine that just as they will say now, so did they say back then: Nothing changes.  The cynic decries the fool who seeks change.  But it is the cynic who is wrong.  Change is the one immutable truth of this universe.  The cynic is like a precocious little child playing in the surf, suddenly filled with a sense of omniscience because he believes he has figured out the pattern of the waves.  He frolics in the water, freely dancing in and out of the rhythm.  But the pattern never holds.  It will always turn and shift and when it does, the power cannot be denied.  No cynic can withstand the immutable force of change any more than the child will be able to stand up when the surf rises high above his head.

I have heard it repeated ad infinitum that Barack Obama is empty.  A sham, a charlatan, a pied piper with a silver tongue.  I know who the real charlatans are.  It is you who, in all confidence, proclaim that you have it all figured out.  Nothing changes.  All politicians are the same, all pursue the same ends and do so by the same means.  But you are wrong and history has already shown this over and over.  You have been lulled into thinking that your perceived reality is continuous, but this is not how nature proceeds.  There are shifts, changes, punctuated equilibrium, tipping points.  Nature abhors a gradient.

You have been made to think you are right because what you say is so often true, but it is only true in the spaces between.  Eventually, you will be proved wrong no matter what you say.

Then there are those who will retain their cynicism in order to proclaim that Barack Obama's speech, while eloquent, did not do enough for him politically.  I say that if this is indeed true, then there is nothing left in this place worth fighting for.  If the best that can be hoped for is insufferable triangulation and political calculation then I say that we are already lost.  If the only way to win is through capitulating to a media that demands soundbites and an electorate that refuses to think by pursuing power through a pragmatism that replaces all principle then there is nothing of value left in this nation.  If pragmatism is to be our only principle then we are doomed to drown in this sea of political expedience.

There is an apocryphal story about scientist and heretic Galileo Galilei.  Galileo had discovered proof that the Earth is not in fact the center of the universe and that it instead revolves around the Sun.  The Church, foolish bulwark against the immutable force of change that it is, demanded that Galileo denounce his heresy.  Galileo, who in many respects is the father of modern science, was made to recant his discovery, his works banned as heretical, and was placed under arrest.  Legend has it that Galileo, after uttering the demanded statement of the Inquistion, was heard to say, "E pur si muove."  And yet it moves.

This is what I say to those of you who have become so closely entangled with your cynicism that you can no longer see clearly the one irrefutable fact of nature.  Change will come.  It cannot be stopped.