America’s Chickens are Coming Home to Roost
Barack Obama's controversial Pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright recently did an interview with Bill Moyers — thus, he is back in the news (also the Republicans are running an ad featuring him in North Carolina, but that's a whole other matter).
Now, this man has said some seriously stupid things (like AIDS was created in a lab to kill blacks in Africa) but there are two comments that seem to generate more anger than any others. First, there is the clip where he says, "God bless America? No, God Damn America!" and then there is the one where, in reference to the attacks on September 11th he says, "America's chickens are coming home to roost."
I wanted to address these two remarks, because as stupid as some of the other things this man has said, anyone who gets offended by these remarks needs to get educated or have their head checked. First, let's deal with "God Damn America".
Are African Americans no longer discriminated against? Was there a memo I missed? The last time I checked, there was still a lot of racial tension in this country and much of it for good reason. You did realize that's what this remark was about, right? In context, he's basically saying that the government isn't helping black communities the way he feels they should, and then they want blacks to get up and sing, "God bless America" like everything is fine and hunky-dory.
Without getting into the pile of evidence that has come out over the years showing that the Republican party did in fact deliberately try to disenfranchise black voters in Florida during the 2000 election and elsewhere, let's just say that there's enough real racially motivated stuff going down to make some African Americans a little paranoid. Are we going to judge them for that too?
Seriously, when did it become not-okay for blacks to speak out when they have good reason to feel they aren't being treated equally? When did it become not-okay to criticize the government for not doing anything about such racism?
And this second quote about chickens "coming home to roost" — first off, Rev. Wright was actually quoting someone else there, but to be fair he was agreeing with the sentiment. But what exactly is wrong with that sentiment?
Let's examine it. He's basically saying we deserved 9/11, right? Not exactly, what he's saying is that we could have avoided it if we hadn't been sticking our noses where they didn't belong. That's a little different. If you had a friend that always rode a motorcycle without a helmet and he was killed in an accident where his helmet probably would have saved him, would you say your friend "deserved" it? Certainly not, but you would be upset knowing it could have been avoided, wouldn't you?
And so was Jeremiah Wright. He pointed to America's constant interference in other countries, which had been unpopular with many even going back to Reagan and before (Vietnam, anyone?) and was basically saying that these actions by our government created enemies that we didn't need and now it's come back to hurt all of us.
Al Qaeda had actually been attacking us at least as far back as 1996 and possibly before, and their justification from the beginning had been that the United States had left troops in the Holy Land (Saudi Arabia) after the Gulf War (1991) and this was unacceptable to them. It offended them at a religious level, and what's worse was the perception many middle-easterners had that we were only there because we were greedy and protecting our precious oil.
Of course, Rev. Wright probably didn't know any of these details, but he did know what we had done in Iran, Grenada, Nicaragua and many other nations. He knew we'd been installing dictators and funding revolutions, he knew it was making a lot of people angry in these places and when we were attacked he naturally (and correctly) assumed we had finally managed to create some enemies that could hurt us.
So when did it become not-okay to criticize the Government for sticking its nose where it doesn't belong? In fact, the kind of stuff we got our nose into post WWII was unheard of for the first half of the 20th century. War raged in Europe for years and while the U.S. government secretly aided Britain the general sentiment in the U.S. was to let the Europeans sort out their own problems. We have problems at home to deal with and they can fend for themselves. Only when the RMS Lusitania was torpedoed in 1915, a cruise liner with Americans on board, could the U.S. government get enough citizens behind them to join in WWI.
And only a few decades later Hitler invaded Poland, and then France. Americans once again decided by-and-large it was none of our concern. Only when Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese did the government have enough support from the citizens of this country to get involved.
Many would say it's a good thing we did get involved, and even that we should have gotten involved sooner. Perhaps, but those scenarios didn't entirely cure many Americans from thinking that we should focus on matters at home and leave overseas matters alone except in cases of extreme urgency. Certainly you would be hard pressed to make a case that our late entry into WWII suggests we should preemptively throw our military into every potential problem that crops up in the world-at-large.
So whether you agree with or completely disagree with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright it should be clear that these opinions are not extreme, but are extremely valid and held by many other Americans. He spoke passionately about them and was publicly smeared by having a few "shocking" clips cut from what were largely well-reasoned sermons that were not un-American in any way (unless we're suddenly not allowed to criticize actions taken by the government).
The real people who deserve your shock and disgust are the ones who tried to feed you these clips and manipulate your opinion for their own gain. These people counted on being able to use these clips to stir up the latent fear a lot of white people have deep-down about angry black folks. And as Barack Obama said during his famous speech on race March 18th in Philadelphia, having that fear doesn't make you a racist — there's been a lot of tension over the years and that fear is a natural result of it. It's something we need to overcome together.
But the people who are trying to stir up that fear, they are the racists, and they're hoping they can scare you into becoming one. So the next time you see a clip of Rev. Wright on television I hope you get outraged again, but this time direct that outrage at the people who want you to hate the man on the TV screen, a former U.S. Marine who received a letter of commendation from the White House after serving on the medical team that took care of President Lyndon Johnson after a surgery in 1966. A man who has been a spiritual guide for many influential Americans and was even a guest at the White House during the Clinton administration. What?! Yes.
