Perez Hilton.

I have an ongoing argument with myself about why I keep reading his blog.  I’ve been reading his blog for so long that I call celebrities by the silly degrading names he gives them:

Mushy Fartone
Eva LongHOria
LezLo (Lohan)

He has a knack for it.

So I found it very interesting that when Chris Brown beat up Rihanna, Perez, through his website, rabidly attacked Chris Brown and anyone who defended him.  Perez baptized him with his new name : Chris Beat Her Down.  It has made me wonder if he cares that the way he cruelly and gleefully rips into mostly celebrity women criticizing their clothes, weight, breasts, butts, face etc contributes to the attitude that they’re disposable objects.  And that it has it’s place in the world of violence towards women.

I agree with him about Chris Brown.  And I keep reading his blog even though it makes me feel like a bad person.  He quoted Lady Ga Ga saying that she loves him “…because he’s taken something that people don’t think is valid, don’t think is important, and he’s made them obsessed with it.” 
I’d agree with that.  And I’d add that he posts and updates so consistently that it’s easy to get addicted to the stream of information.  Especially one that feeds us such a distinct and emotional opinion.

Reading these funny little posts everyday seems like truth and mostly harmless but personally it feels like I’m less likely to have empathy for people after coming to refer to them as ASSlee Simpson.

screen caps of perezhilton.com

So many days have gone by and I haven’t been able to post here.  I think I reached a point of emotional exhaustion watching some of these people (erm Palin).  It’s been a long and exciting two years.  Four years if I count that day in 2004 when I first heard Barack speak and I cried in my bedroom by myself because I had never heard someone call across the country as if speaking to me–as if reassuring me: You’re not alone.

Today is the beginning. Tomorrow we’re going to have a shiny new president.

I love this anecdote.  Link to original article below:

Obama has the great intellect. I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I’m getting nowhere with the interview, it’s late in the night, he’s on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he’s cranky. Out of the blue I say, ‘Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?’ And he says, ‘Yeah.’ So i say, ‘What did Niebuhr mean to you?’ For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.

And the other thing that does separate Obama from just a pure intellectual: he has tremendous powers of social perception. And this is why he’s a politician, not an academic. A couple of years ago, I was writing columns attacking the Republican congress for spending too much money. And I throw in a few sentences attacking the Democrats to make myself feel better. And one morning I get an email from Obama saying, ‘David, if you wanna attack us, fine, but you’re only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better.’ And it was a perfect description of what was going through my mind. And everybody who knows Obama all have these stories to tell about his capacity for social perception.

David Brooks on Palin, Obama

from the New Yorker’s Editorial endorsement of Barack Obama:

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

—The Editors

It’s like we’re living in a Kirk Cameron 80’s movie.

EXT/INT. SUNRISE TEENAGE BOY’S MESSY ROOM

A pair of large socked feet hit a floor strewn with comics, candy wrappers, and video games. We hear the GROANS of a grown man irritated at being roused out of sleep.

O.S. (Woman’s voice)
Joooohn! Cmon you’re going to miss the bus!

CONTINUOUS
We hear a warbled reply as the large feet shuffle onto bathroom tile. CUT TO the bathroom mirror…EEK! John McCain is BLACK!!!!

John
(blood curdling scream)
AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEECHHHHHHHHEEEWWWWWWW
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

VOICEOVER
This Fall don’t miss the blockbuster of the year everyone’s going to be watching…

CUT TO EXT. disheveled JOHN MCCAIN in black face stands forlornly at the corner with his lunch box as a broke down Straight Talk Express pulls up in front of him. He looks back at his mom and stares into the abyss when the bus comes to a sighing halt and the doors open.

VOICEOVER
The presidential candidate who once had it all (Karl Rove) wakes up one morning only to find he’s lost everything. Can he find a way back to the promise land as a black man? Will they even let him back into his campaign office? Roger Ebert calls it the tearjerker of the year. This fall get ready to laugh and watch a man who by all accounts SHOULD lose but will probably WIN.

CUT TO
BARACK OBAMA in white face.

BARACK
I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message.

What is going on? What is this country I live in??? And who the heck considers a hockey mom a role model? Anything + sports-related moms is more thank likely to be horrific, blood thirsty, and tribal. I should know: my mom is an insane die-hard Knicks fan that would howl and screech at the top her lungs every second of a game. I don’t want my president to be like that! This is crazy.

from drugrehabvermont.com

The history of Valium is not a long one, only 40 years. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, psychopharmacological medications entered American life. These drugs became known as “Mother’s Little Helpers” because of their alleged ability to “help” or “treat” the pressures of motherhood, single-hood, and other womanly problems.

It blows my mind that anyone beyond a racist conservative out of touch white person would consider this Palin real or all American. Alaskans are weird! I mean I’m sure they’re just like us, just like every human being in the world but, their Alaskans, they live with limited hours of sunlight most of the year, they live amongst ice and extra large insects. It’s not prejudice to think that their perspective is not one that most Americans share.

And she’s their queen! Literally she’s their little beauty queen that likes reading children’s literature as pasttime and shooting large mammals. I’m just flabbergasted. I mean I felt bad for her in that Katie Couric interview. I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to get through an interview like that unscathed. I would’ve turned red and started screaming…probably would’ve ripped my mic off and stormed away. But you know what? I shouldn’t even be PICTURING myself in that position. Because I’m not qualified to be running for any kind of elected office. So I think she should go back to where she came from and stop distracting us from the fact that we as a country need to come to terms with the fact that the Republicans by serving John McCain to us on a silver garnished platter are BAMBOOZLING us.

from Duct (Tape) and Cover
By Paul Boyer
Suddenly, it’s 1955, or 1961, or perhaps 1982. Our current obsession with bottled water, spare blankets, fresh batteries, duct tape, and plastic sheeting triggers weird memories of “civil defense” hysterias past, when our leaders warned us in apocalyptic tones to prepare for the worst. In the Eisenhower era, they advised us to keep at least a half tank of gas in our car at all times, so we could head off for God knows where when the missiles began to fall. At other times, they advised us to hole up in the basement, reciting nursery rhymes or the multiplication tables to keep calm. Men were told to wear wide-brimmed hats, and women long-sleeved blouses, to protect against the “heat flash” of an atomic blast or ward off radiation. As John F. Kennedy sparred with Nikita Khrushchev over Berlin in 1961, he proved his toughness by terrifying the nation with talk of an imminent atomic attack and urging everyone to build fallout shelters.

Dear Mom and Dad

Please don’t vote for Palin. As Harry Truman said, ‘if you want to live like a Republican, you have to vote Democrat’.

I love you,
your daughter

**********************************************************

First of all a pro-life catholic perspective.

Secondly, I will live the rest of my life as a middle-class minority woman. If you have to vote your conscience please vote for me to have a better life.

This is a persistent lie:

from the washington post:

Obama’s plan brings tax relief of over $1,000 to each person that makes $38-$66k.

You can compare the two candidates here:

McCain to Obama Tax Plan Comparison Chart

NY Times Candidate Comparison Chart

John McCain wants to win at any cost. You can read about it here:

Editorial of the day: ‘How John McCain lost me’ from the author of the pro-McCain book Citizen McCain.

John McCain <3 Mao: A lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth

Video response to above article:

He’s a soldier, not a leader. His doggedness will leave us languishing in Iraq for a hundred years:

On Sept 15, 2008 while bloated wall street collapses in on itself he says:

Because he has said it a hundred times before:

John McCain won’t fight for you:

Listen to him forget he has 7 houses

He’s not the man he used to be:

INTERMISSION: Sarah Palin Special

From an Alaskan colleague

What McCain didn’t know about Sarah

A Palin FAQ

You Decide, ‘Sambo beat the bitch?’

Back to McCain : Lies don’t matter?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-cQ_lhk9nk

A tally of McCain’s lies to date

NY Times explores McCain’s ethics

When all else fails go to factcheck.org– a non partisan website keeping the candidates honest.

Character

Obama’s character according to enemies. Click here to watch Bill O’reilly give his impression of meeting Obama.

John McCain’s humor

John McCain’s temperament according to friends

and BTW Palin’s character, ethics, and hubris:

Palin’s humor:

she laughs with shock jocks calling a cancer victim a ‘bitch’:

Palin says her favorite writer is CS Lewis–essentially a children’s book writer that has been characterized as antisemitic. What is it that she reads?

For someone that cares about life, it depends on what kind of life. She doesn’t believe that global warming is man-made.

Don’t stop believing

The other day at the grocery store I said to K that I wanted to grab a bag of Bertolli’s frozen pasta dinner. K asked me if someone had recommended it to me and I answered ‘uh-huh, it was on Top Chef’.

It didn’t really matter that I didn’t listen to Palin’s speech given that her ‘pitbull with lipstick’ line has been on a loop on CNN, rendering her inescapable. She projects something naggingly familiar to me. Maybe it’s that she looks like Tina Fey; or maybe that her voice sounds like Frances McDormand in Fargo; or that she delivers her lines like she’s in Wedding Crashers trying to take down Vince Vaughn with a withering smirk. David Letterman’s astute observation that Palin’s photos looked like a LensCrafter’s ad was hysterical but also really disturbing. She is so familiar that I almost can’t even process what I think about her. On one hand you have Gloria Borger and Alex Castellanos endlessly debating whether or not it’s ok to refer to Palin as shrill and on the other hand you have the coquettish Governor diverting our attention from facts with flashy speeches and images of an American life that are stunningly foreign. It takes meditative mindfulness to watch the news these days and not have all the blood race to my head.

Being Asian American has never been an issue for me. If you asked me to list how I identify myself I would say Asian American before anything else. I grew up in a predominantly white suburb like most of my Asian American brothers and sisters but there was a very strong sub-community of Filipinos in my county. My parents were very social and active within this community. One year my dad was even the president of Tanglaw the local Filipino association. I grew up understanding and enjoying the two sides of myself– life with my non-Asian friends at school and then my Filipino family and friends at home. I naturally had alot of teen angst and went through difficult years trying to understand my place in the world but the one thing I embraced was that I was Filipino and American.

I think part of the anger and confusion that Sarah Palin brings up for me has to do with not having gone through the same process of understanding what it means to be a woman. I realize that being angry can’t be a lifestyle. And before coming to Hawaii I was angry most of the time. If not knowing much about Gov. Palin can be good for anything maybe it’s a good reminder that you can’t possibly hate anything you don’t know.

I used to think that I was socially moderate—not liberal. Sometimes I even suspected that I had more of a tendency towards more conservative values. When Barack Obama emerged I supported him because he was different and I trusted him despite my distrustful nature and a general feeling of indifference towards politics.

I can thank Sarah Palin for giving me a shove into the next phase of my political maturation and helping me to realize definitively that what I am in my heart is liberal.

Contrary to what an Ohio Clinton Puma said on the floor of the RNC, I’m not a one issue voter. I’m not offended and appalled by Sarah Palin because I’m so narrow minded as to judge her on one issue. I’m an ALL issues voter. And in my opinion Sarah Palin upholds at least four major political beliefs and values on a scale that could have an impact on my life if she were to become Vice President of the United States—one malignant brown spot away from the presidency.

I was raised by Charismatic Catholic parents and taught that the road to salvation was non negotiable. When I was 12 I enrolled in a pro-life group through my church. At 17 I registered as a republican and in my first years of college my parents would pick me up in the city to make sure I came home to vote on one issue- abortion. As a side note I once hastily ran for president of my class and when asked what I stood for I said I was against the death penalty. So at least I was consistent: I cared for life.

Which is more than what I can say for most conservatives. Including this spectre of a modern hardworking woman, Gov. Sarah Palin.

I don’t understand women that believe that it should be law that other women ultimately have no choice over their own bodies. What is the difference of breaking through a glass ceiling if our bodies remain slaves to the overwhelmingly Old, White, Men who long to legislate this control. It’s more than heartbreaking that women who rise to power have to either shed all vestiges of being womanly on the outside or else in Sarah’s case on the inside. Her views are that of a man, and not a reasonable man but an insecure, angry, fearful man.

Sarah is:
Against abortion in all cases including rape and incest
She believes in capital punishment
She is against gun control
She is against educating youth on safe sex and
Supports creationism in schools.

I have yet to hear someone tell me why it is ok to fight for the life of a zygote but discard the life of a youth or adult that has violated laws that we ourselves created. Why?

I don’t know when life begins and I don’t know if hardened criminals are capable of rehabilitation. I do know that enforcing more and more laws and abandoning more people in the process of enforcing these laws is a road to the end of the world.

Maybe that’s where people like Sarah have their gaze fixed. Maybe it’s all about reaching judgment day as a righteous individual. Maybe they truly believe in a gate to Heaven where they can tally up who they saved and who they held accountable and at that glorious point be bestowed the rewards of Heaven. But then isn’t that just like the people who do it for their 72 virgins?

Two days ago, we watched Barack Obama accept the historic Democratic presidential nomination in front of 38 million viewers, almost 90,000 who were present in the stadium with him.

I’d grown disenchanted with the political process and had lost most of my enthusiasm for Barack. After his speech on Thursday, at the grocery store, I couldn’t help singing and smiling and acting like I didn’t have a care in the world. My candidate understood something about me and he didn’t even know me, and maybe he didn’t even know he understood but it didn’t matter.

What the naysayers don’t get is that it’s not about me it’s about you.

I learned how to be a poet from my teacher Kurt Lamkin. He taught us to write using principles of oral tradition –his focus was to teach us how to write in our heads and hearts, not on paper. He called it Live Poem. We wrote, edited, and performed from memory dozens and dozens of times before choosing a way to document the piece. I was a fiction writer and the only poetry I’d ever written at that point was on the back pages of my diaries and the margins of my highschool notebooks. As far as I understood, like most people, poetry just had to rhyme.

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat.
They took some honey and plenty of money
Wrapped in a five pound note
-Edward Lear

Kurt in the beginning taught us very little. Writing and performing in that class was like jumping into the deep part of the ocean every time. You had to get up in front of your peers, let go of all your inhibitions, and share the things that you harbored in your soul no matter how lost you were because to resist brought everything to a halt. Over that year when I was 20 years old, through the process of writing poetry I found out who I was, and some of what I had inside me.

Kurt repeatedly urged us to let go of ‘trying’ to tell a story, to find the simplest way to say what was in our hearts and it would always rhyme. I learned then that truth has cadence. And we know when we hear the truth because it resonates in our soul.

words coming easy to me:
matchstick,
toothpick,
boy,
shadow of a shadow of a sun
shadow of a shadow of a night
straining to remember your voice…

Maybe Barack knows my teacher.

I became enamored with Barack the same time most people did- during his keynote for the 2004 DNC. Listening to him stirred something inside me that I had never felt in my life. My country and government were always ‘other’. Or maybe it was I who was the ‘other’. Politics and government always happened as part of the country that I only barely felt a part of. Growing up on Long Island as a Filipino American was not necessarily hard but it also wasn’t extraordinary.

When I heard Barack speak that day I felt what many white people must grow up feeling: patriotism or the entitlement to it. He was relaxed, warm, and knew himself well enough to speak to our country in a way I had never heard someone of color speak in my 30 years on this planet. The clarion call I heard that day sang don’t be afraid.

I believe that we have a righteous wind at our backs and that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us.

America! Tonight, if you feel the same energy that I do, if you feel the same urgency that I do, if you feel the same passion that I do, if you feel the same hopefulness that I do — if we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that all across the country, from Florida to Oregon, from Washington to Maine, the people will rise up in November, and John Kerry will be sworn in as President, and John Edwards will be sworn in as Vice President, and this country will reclaim its promise, and out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come.

When he reemerged in 2007 and rumors of his running for president began to circulate I was only moderately interested. The three years that had passed were numbing: the tenacious war, Guantanamo, reality TV. We live in an established culture of despondence, indifference, and cruelty. What began way back in 2001 as a country fascinated with creating and watching shock and awe turned into a world bored by shock and awe.

Barack’s probable campaign also brought up memories of my short-lived enthusiasm for Gen. Wesley Clark in the previous election year. Gen. Clark had won me over with his demand for government transparency on Real Time with Bill Maher. It was so refreshing to hear someone who could convincingly project the persona of a leader and who spoke in an intelligent and compassionate manner.

I put up campaign signs in my cubicle at work only to draw ridicule from coworkers. Gedi Sibony, an artist I admire, vandalized my propaganda. Next to the words ‘PATRIOT’, ‘HONOR’, EXPERIENCE’, he carefully wrote words like ‘TRAITOR’, ‘MANIPULATIVE’, ‘EGO’ in very careful penmanship. This was the first time as an adult that I voiced my political opinion openly and wasn’t sure how to respond to someone questioning my enthusiasm. My response was to print out more signs, only this time in color and self-laminated.

When I went to hear Gen. Clark speak at Hunter College just a couple of blocks away from work, I was faced with the disappointment of the man in person as opposed to the man on television. Clark had lost his voice and was speaking very quietly and with great difficulty. He had no presence and there was the feeling that he was there like all of us, waiting for a revelation.

One of the grade school kids standing behind him as part of the stagecraft keeled over before Clark’s speech had even begun. Clark made a joke about soldiers learning to never stand with their knees locked. The kid was ok but I wasn’t…his fainting turned out to be the most exciting part of Gen. Clark’s speech. I left still liking Clark but only for his sake and not mine. When his campaign dwindled I’d ceased to care.

When Barack Obama announced his candidacy in 2007 I was happy but more inclined to like Hillary. I watched every debate and began a year-long vigil with CNN. I remember going back and forth between the two candidates, always landing on the side of Hillary because Hillary is fantastic and that she is a woman is only a bonus and then when you think of her gender as a bonus it’s a revelation.

At the thorniest point of the heated Clinton-Obama battle, enter Rev. Jeremiah Wright saying blasphemous and fantastic things:

When it came to putting her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in interment prison camps.

When it came to putting the citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters. Put them on auction blocks. Put them in cotton fields. Put them in inferior schools. Put them in substandard housing. Put them in scientific experiments. Put them in the lower paying jobs. Put them outside the equal protection of the law. Kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness.

The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law and then wants us to sing God Bless America. Naw, naw, naw. Not God Bless America. God Damn America! That’s in the Bible. For killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating us citizens as less than human. God Damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and she is Supreme.

What the Reverend said was what many of us feel in our hearts. It’s what many non-whites think and take for granted everyday. If these were Obama’s roots, he deserved more credit from me. It was revolutionary. But I knew that it couldn’t remain so and Barack would have to choose between his roots and winning. I thought however he chooses he’ll lose.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their world view in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

The day he gave his race speech, I was at work. I got an email from his campaign saying that he had just delivered a very important speech on race. I watched him on youtube and felt a soaring pride because I could picture how he came to write what he did and I reveled in his bravery to share it with all of us. He didn’t disavow (at that point) or discredit his Reverend and mentor. He took the time to think about why he believed in Rev. Wright, why he looked to Wright for spiritual guidance and in his heart he could see how all those things that Wright preached and believed could be true but could just as easily be not true. Obama has the ability to identify the nuances of his feelings and even greater, he knows how to write them down so those that want to understand can understand. The day Barack delivered ‘A More Perfect Union’ was when I left Hillary for good but I’ll always love her.

Hillary Clinton at the 2008 DNC:
This is the story of America. Of women and men who defy the odds and never give up. How do we give this country back to them?

By following the example of a brave New Yorker , a woman who risked her life to shepherd slaves along the Underground Railroad. And on that path to freedom, Harriett Tubman had one piece of advice:

If you hear the dogs, keep going.
If you see the torches in the woods, keep going.
If they’re shouting after you, keep going.
Don’t ever stop. Keep going.
If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.
Even in the darkest of moments, ordinary Americans have found the faith to keep going.

I’ve seen it in you. I’ve seen it in our teachers and firefighters, nurses and police officers, small business owners and union workers, the men and women of our military – you always keep going.

Over the next few months I would give small amounts to Barack’s campaign. I live paycheck to paycheck and the only other time I ever wrote a check for a cause was Katrina. But I was enthusiastic, utterly in love with my brave candidate. My friends and I would have heated debates in the Bowery Hotel Lounge, over dinner or in cars. Politics, the world, Obama …there was so much to say so many closed doors in our minds to open and I felt for the first time as an adult that the world didn’t have to be this way. The world didn’t have to be so sad. I didn’t have to be so sad.

As with anything that lasts longer than a few months, the mind grows tired and righteousness needs a break. Barack won the primary and his battle to do so took it’s toll. I was so tired of all the maneuvering even though I understood and understand that it’s an inherent part of the process. It’s politics, not real life.

My disenchantment grew and I stopped my little donations to the campaign. I heard about FISA, Senator Palmer, his joke about short Asians, and that his campaign had misspelled Anna Wintour’s name (an ardent supporter and fundraiser) and they didn’t care! I began to observe Obama with suspicion. I resigned myself, as Bill Maher said on Larry King, to not finding my ideological candidate. I would vote for him when the time came and I would only bring up my doubts with good friends. But for me the rush of empowerment was gone. I did with Barack what I do with most people–I placed him squarely in the category of big fat phony.

I believed alot of the negative things that were said about him. That he was a rabidly ambitious politician that soars on rhetoric and charisma. That he doesn’t have the experience to be Commander-in-chief. That his experience as a community organizer isn’t sufficient preparation for the office of President of the United States. These things may be true, in fact likely true. But after his speech on Thursday I realized it doesn’t matter. I would support him and fight for him if those things were true times two.

On Thursday, August 28 2008, he and his team delivered an event that was most spectacular in all good ways–not in a kill, destroy, humiliate way. In fact many of the speakers had their speeches edited by Obama’s staff to strike any negative attacks on McCain. He produced an event that drew more people than a political rally had ever drawn. He said ‘I’m going to have it in a football stadium and I’m going to fill that stadium’. And he did.

In that moment, the most serious one of his life, carrying hundreds of thousands even millions of hopes out onto that podium with him he took a breath and delivered what we as a generation needed: the truth of his soul. And in my assessment it rhymed.

That promise is our greatest inheritance. It’s a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours – a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.

And it is that promise that forty five years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln’s Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.

The men and women who gathered there could’ve heard many things. They could’ve heard words of anger and discord. They could’ve been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred.

But what the people heard instead – people of every creed and color, from every walk of life – is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.

“We cannot walk alone,” the preacher cried. “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”

America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise – that American promise – and in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

Thank you, God Bless you, and God Bless the United States of America.

post script: