I just returned from a wonderful holiday in interior Mexico, where access to e-mail was blessedly infrequent, and I’m overwhelmed by a cacophony of events and news updates hitting my mailbox.
How can so much go awry in a fortnight?
• The reversal of Joe Nacchio’s conviction by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals means he will get a new trial. Two of the three judges on the panel determined that District Court Judge Edward Nottingham erred in refusing to allow an expert witness to testify on Nacchio’s behalf.
• The swift resignation of New York’s high-profile Democratic governor, Eliot Spitzer. Hubris and wanton carelessness brought this rising political star down in less than 48 hours after federal agents determined he used a pricey call-girl ring at least eight times in recent months. It may not be fair, but elected officials are held to a higher standard of behavior, because behavior reflects judgment and that’s what counts. When someone privileged with the responsibility of overseeing the public good believes he or she is above the laws, conventions or ethical behavior of ordinary people, it is an utter violation of public trust.
• More recently, an e-alert from the Colorado Senate Republicans. Imagine! Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter appointed two environmentalists to the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission! The nerve of Colorado’s pro-environment, clean-energy governor to appoint people to policy-making commissions who share his values and priorities. Fellas, that’s what elections are about — the right of the electorate to express their views by voting for leaders whose principles and goals they want implemented.
All of this epitomizes the politics of distraction.
However, the utter disintegration of healthy debate between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama resulting in The Speech, may be a catalyst for a different journey. Obama’s Tuesday morning polemic was perhaps the most direct and unvarnished statement of the reality of racial conditions in this country since Martin Luther King’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:
Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.
Nearly half a century later, the first person of color to be a viable candidate for president of these United States posed a heartfelt challenge:
For 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. . . . Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.”
A courageous young man, born of a white mother and black father and raised by his mother and white grandmother, articulated a vision for this country that hearkens back to our founding fathers (“We the people in order to form a more perfect union”), to Lincoln’s second inaugural address (“a house divided against itself cannot stand”), and to MLK.
Each of us has a choice. We can continue to negotiate the politics of divisiveness, to defend the prejudices of our parents and grandparents, to blindly accept the sound bites of talk radio and YouTube, to wrap ourselves in the mantle of fear and inflexibility. Or we can ascend the platform of hope and change — a platform that’s big enough for all of us, that’s strong enough to hold our pasts, our differences, strengths and frailties.
The choice is ours.
Are we ready to form a more perfect union?
Susan Barnes Gelt (bs13@qwest.net) served eight years on the Denver City Council and was an aide to former Denver Mayor Federico Pena.
