The last time I wrote, Haiti had just been devastated by a series of major earthquakes. At that time, no one seemed able to quickly do what the world community most wanted, to help the poor and wounded and homeless people of that tortured country.
There is still much to be done. In fact, real recovery is just beginning, and things are looking up for Haiti. Most importantly of all, President Bill Clinton pledged to focus the next three years of his life on rebuilding the country. Throughout next year, the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, headed by Clinton, will oversee the rebuilding dollars pledged by many nations. Additionally, on the last day of June, came the news that several large monetary funds were forgiving $1.2 Billion dollars of Haiti’s debt. That means $50 million more can now be used to help the poverty stricken nation.
While not writing about Haiti and other local and national issues, I have been writing, fiercely, trying to finish my memoir. It has a name and a publisher now. PoliPoint Press will be publishing Never in my Wildest Dreams. More… in fact lots more… on that in the future.
What bought me back to my computer was last Monday’s big dust-up with former Georgia director of rural development Shirley Sherrod, or rather it was the web conversations that started and continue, and deserve to be noted.
Many thoughtful people have taken this incident as a Teaching Moment, whatever that means. From the multitude of postings I’ve read, it was Sunday’s piece in the Washington Post by Michelle Singletary that turned the conversation for me. Add a line from last Wednesday’s column by Michael Gerson, who was President George W. Bush’s favorite speechwriter, and maybe something important has happened, something deserving of letting this story live a little longer.
You would have had to be out of the country not to know the story, but in summary, Shirley Sherrod was speaking at the National Convention of the NAACP. She made a speech about racial reconciliation. It was later edited by a right wing blogger and exploited by the Fox News network to make it appear she had been making racist remarks about white farmers. Sherrod was immediately fired. The NAACP affirmed that it did not endorse racism by anyone before investigating to see if that was the case here. The White House joined in the condemnation, also before investigating; and, until people like Country music star Willie Nelson, who has known Sherrod for 25 years, rose to her defense, a long life of service had been smeared, and was about to be destroyed.
Now one week later, the truth is out; her boss, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, and President Obama have apologized and asked her to come back to work. She hasn’t decided yet whether she will or not.
That’s all old news. The new conversation started by Singletary advises us to hear Sherrod out; that this story is not about race, but about economic inequality, and that raises the bar. The columnist points out that the number of people who believe they are among the have–nots has doubled from 17 percent in 1988 to 34 percent in 2007.
Numerous studies have confirmed the widening gap between the rich and poor in America. Sherrod said that while working with white farmers, she realized that the social war we’ve been having isn’t about race, but economic inequity. In her speech, she said, “it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t, you know. And they could be black; and they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people—those who don’t have access the way others have”. She told her NAACP audience, “The only difference is that the folks with money want to stay in power and whether it’s health care or whatever it is, they’ll do what they need to do to keep that power, you know. It’s always about money…”.
If we look at the two most recent notorious cases of media used to crush liberal voices, the victims had been involved in work that would help the poor to improve their lot: ACORN, the organization that fought for better wages and housing for the poor; and local activist Van Jones and his work to build a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Unflattering stories burned through conservative web blogs and were then taken to national exposure and scathing attacks by the FOX News network.
The same pattern was followed here, except this time there was real videotape of the speech before it was doctored and the manipulation was exposed.
Michael Gerson pointed out in a thoughtful piece, “Signs of Sanity from the Tea Party”, that “there is a serious danger when evidence of ideological aggression is both easily falsified and universally distributed.”.
It will be interesting to see if this incident and the conversations that have followed will do anything to change the way we approach these kinds of explosive issues. Better yet, will the real subject of Shirley Sherrod’s speech become part of our national conversation?
Finally back to Shirley Sherrod. In the 1970’s, Sherrod and her husband ran a farming cooperative. They were part of a group that charged the Department of Agriculture with discrimination and won a settlement of over $1 Billion. Following that experience, she came to realize that the real battle is between the well off and those with less. During these times of high unemployment and bad economic news for the masses, it would be good to listen to Shirley Sherrod and to talk more about the economic divide which has no color lines.
