STATE OF THE UNION
"[M]any of our fellow citizens have felt excluded from the promise of our country."
Yesterday, I wrote:
If I were Coretta Scott King and had heard that Samuel Alito was given a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, I probably would have died too.
I wrote this quickly without articulating my point. I meant to be neither funny nor disrespectful, and I apologize to those I offended.
After hearing the news about Coretta Scott King's passing, I found my sadness transforming into bitterness and then rage upon reading President Bush's statements about her, which were closely followed by his statements about Justice Alito's confirmation, which were then preceded by his unabashedly hypocritical State of the Union speech.
Yesterday, Bush and other Republican leaders publicly celebrated the life of Mrs. King (and her husband), who dedicated their lives to peace, civil rights, and ending poverty.
Yet, neither Bush nor most commentators saw any irony or felt difficulty praising Mrs. King while continuing to defend the war on Iraq or applauding the nomination of Justice Alito, who has been steadfastly opposed to increasing the numbers of people of color at the nation's top universities. President Bush, in his State of the Union speech, could have been inspired by Mrs. King's life and death to announce actual policies intended to reverse the trend of the widening racial gap in this country. (Most notably, the fact that poverty within the African African community rose from 22.7 percent in 2001 to 24.7 percent in 2004.) But he didn't.
It's one thing if Mrs. King had passed away at a moment in history in which we were all working to reach that mountaintop, of which Dr. King spoke. It's another for her to pass while those in power continue to push people down the mountain or ignore those suffering to climb.
While I am not utterly hopeless or despondent about this situation, it can be challenging, these days, to muster optimism, and I can only imagine what Mrs. King thought, for example, when our government continued to deny the role of race or poverty in the tragedy of Katrina.
Needless to say, I hope Coretta Scott King is resting in peace.
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