Obama reorienting our Moral Compass (cartoon)

Wisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY) based on Linn Washington, Jr. (PhilyTrib.com, 11-13-12)

Business as Usual: Obama meets with dictator in Buddhist Cambodia this month (AP).

Put it on the prompter and Ill say it.

On the eve of the 2012 presidential election, Selma James, an internationally-respected activist living in London, offered some insights bound to anger Obama-hero-worship circles:

“Obama has disappointed us so much, but he has a second chance, and we will not leave it up to him,” James said before she delivered an address in Center City around her latest book Sex, Race and Class, featuring a collection of writings by the widow of famed Caribbean author/intellectual/activist CLR James.

One area that President Obama and America’s political-power elites cannot ignore any longer, James said during an interview, is America’s alarming and growing rates of poverty [due to incessant war, racism, hypocrisy, and empire-building which enriches the the military-industrial complex as it impoverishes its 310 million expendable citizens].

“The U.S. has more poverty than any industrialized country,” she says about the nation she was born in in 1930 but left for a better life in England a quarter-century later.

“If we don’t address poverty, we will be suicidal. Suicidal greed got the U.S. into this economic mess,” James said. “Remember that Nelson Mandela said that poverty is made by man and can be stopped by man.”

James isn’t blaming Obama for causing poverty or exacerbating it, as his Republican presidential challengers fraudulently did in calling him the “food stamp president.” [That title would better suit George W. Bush. But no one wants to know that most people on welfare in America are White because that counters the stereotype promoted by the mainstream media.]

However, James and others are rightly noting that as president, Obama has a responsibility to address dire issues confronting the country's citizens.

Those issues include poverty (particularly the obscene numbers of children living in poverty), structural joblessness, unjust mass imprisonment, urban decay, climate change, and a host of other issues brushed aside by the body politic for too many years.

As the first Black man nominated by a poltical party to run for the U.S. presidency, thereby making history in the arena of U.S. presidential campaigns noted, “…whenever a government fails to secure for all its citizens that which it guarantees, such a government is nearing dangerous ground...” with such “neglect” becoming like a “cancer” that will continue to grow and spread.

But that Black man was not Barack Obama, nominated by the Democratic Party in 2008. It was George Edwin Taylor, nominated by the National Liberty Party in 1904....

 

During the first term of Philadelphia’s first Black mayor, W. Wilson Goode Sr., there were calls for him to end racially discriminatory police brutality.

 

It was implausible in the 1980s to assert that Mayor Goode didn’t know about it. And it’s implausible in the 21st Century to assert that President Obama doesn’t know what is going on with war, unemployment, poverty brought about by the government, and urban violence throughout the land. 

But the Powers That Be profit from mass incarceration. It's implausible to think the president is unaware of what is happening to Blacks while he sits in the White House reading teleprompters for war-profiteering companies, spying agencies, and the Dept. of War (Pentagon). He should read Dr. Michelle Alexander's books to better understand what he continues to promote after Bush and Cheney.

• Incarceration Nation: Jim Crow in the Age of Colorblindness
• Obama, speak truth to Cambodia's dictator Hun Sen

Holding the U.S. president accountable does not diminish the history-making or role-modeling stature of Barack Obama....

This problem of losing our "moral compass" is not just a Black problem. It is a fundamental problem with America.

And the source of this problem is that Americans believe the myths we concoct about ourselves just as others around the world believe the myths we Americans project about our country.

“One problem I have been having for decades is that many people here believe the myth of the U.S. as the ‘panacea’ of democratic order, which is that they cannot believe their ears... More