My friend Joe Carter, who blogs at Evangelical Outpost, left this comment about Obama that I wanted to highlight because it is the polar opposite of mine... I think...
Obama's latests back-pedaling can't be squared with his original comment. Now he says:"What I was saying is that when economic hardship hits in these communities, what people have is they’ve got family, they’ve got their faith, they’ve got the traditions that have been passed onto them from generation to generation.
So what are these traditions being passed on? According to his original statement: gun rights, religion, xenophobia, and protectionism.
“[I]t’s not surprising, then, that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Does Obama believe that xenophobia and protectionism are, like religion, traditions that are passed on from "generation to generation"?
This is an example of what I dislike (intensely) about Obama. Whenever he (or his friends) say anything controversial, it is not that he is wrong--I don't think I've ever heard him fully apologize for anything--but rather that we have failed to understood the true context.
This last point is the most interesting to me... is his failure to apologize courage or is it arrogance?
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Ando:
So then you don't deny that Obama behaved reprehensibly in this matter? Excellent! That's what I gathered from your "comment."
Mel,
I was responding to your comment about "inner-city blacks." What does Obama's personal history have to do with that??
My wife and I are both white, and the products of small towns. My family did fine, but hers was poor by any reasonable standard. It would be unkind for someone to belittle our roots, but those roots don't hinder us when it comes to getting a job, getting a good education for our kids, or getting treated fairly when we get stopped by the police. It's not a double standard; it's a recognition of two drastically different histories. As the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, "a page of history is worth a volume of logic."
Peace.
What I like about Obama is that he recognizes nuance. It's possible to cling to traditions that are both good and bad, sometimes exclusively one or the other, sometimes nuanced in and of themselves. Thus, people in the communities he speaks of can cling to religion (the good) and antipathy towards immigrants (the bad). The problem is that American politics are leeched of all nuance, so such an explanation isn't really acceptable.
How sad that somehow Senator Obama's comments are taken as "racist" and "elitist". I am a Black American whose family hails from the smallest of small towns. As that town dies we do cling to our faith and our Lord (refusing to cling to the Lord has caused more problems than pretty much anything else IMHO), we do cling to our guns in the form of hunting. Hunting is the time that our family gets together, we bond and tell stories, and we kill meat for the freezer which is divided up by need. For some it is pretty much the only meat they get. Is there antipathy towards immigrants? Sadly, yes. The Black community is especially wary of the effect of immigrants on the economy. Is that right? Perhaps not but it is a fact. There seems to be a knee jerk reaction to see everything that Senator Obama says through the lens of his race. If we tried to just see it as humans and realize that poor comes in all colors, that intolerance is not the sole province of any nationality, and that it will take all of us to move forward, things would be a bit better. You'll pardon me if I continue to hope for this while clinging to Christ. It's the only way I know how to be.
I hope McCain is elected, and I hope his policies of ceaseless military action and continued tax breaks for the rich bankrupt this nation. Our children and grandchildren will pay the price. Enjoy their food riots, their homeless shanty-towns, and their police-state politics.
It will be nothing less than we deserve.
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