Sorry I haven't been around as much folks...for any of those that follow my blog *chirp* *chirp*...but I haven't forgotten about or given up on the blog. Just been busy, spending time with the family, playing internet games, and the like. There are lots of things I love to discuss, but the topic on my mind at the moment that I have to get off my chest is the recent controversy with Barack Obama's preacher, Jeremiah Wright.
In the past, Barack has spoke about, and I whole-heartedly agree, that words can be inspirational. They can call people to act, they can cause people to change their ways, they can envoke emotions in people that they didn't realize existed inside them, they can change lives.
What he has recently failed to acknowledge, via his weak decrying of Jeremiah Wright's sermons, that words can also discourage. They can create hate, they can cause people to lash out, they can tear people, family, and/or friends apart, and they can equally envoke emotions in people that would scare others.
On one hand, I can understand that he must be in a hard position. He has to balance his loyalty to his spiritual advisor with his desire to be president. On the other hand, it's worrisome that someone who would want to be president of the United States would be loyal to someone like that to begin with.
It's not cherry-picking. The clips are there for the world to see, unedited. They show a man speaking passionately and confidently. They indicate that this man, a pastor, firmly believes everything he is saying, and it's hard to believe that this is just one side of a man's personna that is able to be switched off after the sermon is over.
They are hateful words. They come from a place that I don't know about, can't fathom or even barely empathize with. Jeremiah Wright is entitled to those opinions and is allowed to speak them freely. Barack Obama is allowed to believe what Jeremiah Wright says, or believe that this is only a small slice of who the man is.
The President of the United States, however, is not allowed to believe that.
Jeremiah Wright believes that the United States is a bad place...that it's government purposefully harms people and that it intends to harm people. By default, the President of the United States can not believe in these things.
If Barack Obama hopes to be the next president of our country, we should accept nothing less than a full denouncement of Jeremiah Wright and a full explaination of how his beliefs differ from Jeremiah Wright and why he differs from those views yet still attended his church for the past 20 years. I hope he does, for his own sake.
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