Obama '08: Revealing America's Achilles Heel

By ChasingAmerica - Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 10:59 AM

The U.N. has delivered a human rights investigator to America to report "on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance," especially as it relates to this current political cycle.

One thing America has always been able to do is put on a smile for the world. 

Here in America, everything's rainbows and lollipops.  We are a strong, blessed country that provides equal opportunity and gainful employment to every single one of its citizens.  Here in the United States of America, no one is ever denied housing, jobs, loans, proper education, equal police protection, equality under the law - not anything.

America is perfect.  Didn't the U.N. get the memo?  It's faxed everyday by blowhards on the right (i.e. Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs) who scrunch up their faces at the mere mention of incidences like the one in New York when Sean Bell, a soon-to-be groom, was gunned down by police on the night before his wedding. 

Or like when Megan Williams, a West Virginian woman, was held hostage by 6 people who raped her, tortured her, and called her epithets for little more than a week.

Or like when Philadelphia police kicked and punched 3 innocent men into submission during a police stop stemming from a call that reported a shooting and little else information.

Everyone knows that unwarranted, senseless beatings in which a citizen's bones are broken are normal police protocol. 

America is perfect because every single person who ever goes missing gets the exact same news coverage and the same sympathetic slant in that news coverage. 

Because we value every single one of our hard-working citizens here in America, no matter the race.

And undocumented workers are completely at fault, no ifs ands or buts about it.  The companies who hire them illegally are not criminals at all.  Those peanuts-for-wages job providers are not the first perpetrators.  The immigrant who is manipulated and abused should have known better than to have come to a country that promises equal protection under the law, but won't even aggressively go after these modern day slave factories the same way they do the undocumented worker.

And the stories, one after another, of men found guilty of identical crimes but receiving vastly different sentences than other men of a certain characteristic are not an issue or an epidemic at all.

Finally, America's finest and proudest moment was when Secret Service agents spent time on the job writing emails hinting at the pleasure they would take in the death of an American citizen, Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Yeah, the Secret Service charged with the duty to protect the President joke about the demise of one of the major proponents of civil rights in this country and yes, we now have a black man running for president.

But no connection can be made between any of these circumstances or incidences to this presidential election cycle.  None.

Back here on earth where reality is non-negotiable, there are those in America already cocking their guns and aiming them at this U.N. investigator, preparing to shoot the messenger.  Because, you see, it's a lot easier, cowardly even, to criticize the source than to grapple with what will most likely be his very real, very shameful message about America.

Racism is America's Achilles heel.  We'll either all succumb to it, crumbling to our knees as united sufferers.  Or we will stand, broken but not defeated, to answer Senator Barack Obama's call to make this nation a "more perfect union."

If this U.N. investigator comes to the conclusion that America is not perfect after his rigorous research and investigations, I will not be surprised.  I just hope I'm not ultimately disappointed in our response and action to such news.  

I hope we'll have the guts to own up to it and put unfettered effort in bettering this country, live up to the ideals that so many put so much bluster in saying we already live up to -- even though reality tells us that we don't. 

Read ChasingAmerica’s Last Article: Northern Exposure: The Obvious Truth About the Deceptive Palin

 

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