After bash, city looks forward - The Woonsocket Call

OPINION
PUBLISHER: Mary Lynn Bosiak
Executive Editor: Bianca Pavoncello
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Page A4
THE CALL — Saturday, August 31, 2013
For a moment,
it was enough
For a little while on Wednesday, it was
enough.
It was enough to hear civil rights hero
John Lewis insist that this America is better
than the one where his blood spilled for
justice.
"Sometimes I hear people
saying nothing has
changed," he said, "but for
someone to grow up the
way I grew up, in the cotton
fields of Alabama, to
now be serving in the
United States Congress
makes me want to tell
them, 'Come and walk in Connie Schultz
my shoes.'"
It was enough to watch the family of
Martin Luther King Jr. gather around the
bell that once hung in the 16th Street
Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Less
than three weeks after King's "I Have a
Dream" speech, three girls died in a bombing
at that church.
"A Negro mother wept in the street
Sunday morning in front of a Baptist
Church in Birmingham," Atlanta
Constitution Editor Eugene Patterson wrote
in a column the next day. "In her hand she
held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her
dead child.
We hold that shoe with her. Every one
of us in the white South holds that small
shoe in his hand."
At 3 p.m., the King family rang that
bell, and it was enough.
Then the first African-American president
of the United States stood in the very
spot where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered
his "I Have a Dream" speech. For a
few minutes, it was enough to see him
standing there. To hear his gratitude for the
sacrifices that bore the fruit of his victory.
To listen to him as he listed the kinds of
Americans who refuse to give up on their
country, on their fellow citizens.
"That tireless teacher who gets to class
early and stays late and dips into her own
pocket to buy supplies because she believes
that every child is her charge — she's
marching," he said.
"That successful businessman who doesn't
have to but pays his workers a fair wage
and then offers a shot to a man, maybe an
ex-con, who's down on his luck — he's
marching.
"The mother who pours her love into her
daughter so that she grows up with the confidence
to walk through the same doors as
anybody's son — she's marching.
"The father who realizes the most
important job he'll ever have is raising his
boy right, even if he didn't have a father,
especially if he didn't have a father at home
— he's marching.
"The battle-scarred veterans who devote
themselves not only to helping their fellow
warriors stand again and walk again and
run again but to keep serving their country
when they come home — they are marching.
"Everyone who realizes what those glorious
patriots knew on that day, that change
does not come from Washington but to
Washington, that change has always been
built on our willingness, we the people, to
take on the mantle of citizenship -- you are
marching."
I am an impatient patriot, loving my
country but always wanting more than the
current state of affairs. Often, desperately, I
draw comfort from the late Rev. William
Sloane Coffin's words: "There are three
kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The
bad ones are the uncritical lovers and the
loveless critics.
Good patriots carry on a lover's quarrel
with their country, a reflection of God's
lover's quarrel with all the world."
For hours before the president walked
onto the steps of the Lincoln Memorial,
one famous American after another walked
to the microphone and, for the most part,
gave a version of the same speech.
I watched the steady stream of speakers
and thought about how easy it is to feel
ordinary and ineffective these days in our
culture of celebrity.
If you weren't invited to be onstage, if
you didn't have the schedule or the money
to travel to Washington this week, was it
harder to think you, too, can make a difference?
"Not everybody can be famous," Martin
Luther King Jr. said, "but everybody can be
great because greatness is determined by
service." I've listened at least a hundred
times to someone else deliver that quotation,
and every time, I hear it a bit differently.
What is service? What is the definition
of greatness?
On Wednesday, millions of regular
Americans paused to ask such questions, of
their country and themselves.
For every person who felt the push to
get back into the march, it was enough.
Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning
columnist and an essayist for Parade
magazine.
As others see it: Veterans benefits
Notable Quotables
The Record Journal of Meriden
(Conn.):
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
should extend full federal benefits to
retired military personnel with same-sex
spouses.
Continued refusal to do so is irrational.
Resistance conflicts with recently established
precedents. Last July, U.S. Supreme
Court judges altered portions of the
Defense of Marriage Act that prevented
gay couples from receiving federal benefits
available to people in opposite-sex marriages.
Consequently, the Department of
Defense on Aug. 14 expanded such rights
to all uniformed service members, regardless
of sex of significant others.
America's social tide is turning in favor
of greater equality for the gay population.
By remaining intractable against this modern
wave of civil rights, the VA appears
intolerant. For men and women who served
their country, this is an unwarranted, reprehensible
insult.
If department officials extend full benefits
to veterans in same-sex marriages, the
move, besides being logical, will deservedly
acknowledge the efforts and sacrifices of
all who spent time in our nation's service.
And it's more than a matter of principle.
Gay partners denied their federal rights can
face difficult monetary and health care hurdles.
Bills for medicine or hospital procedures
— covered for people in oppositegender
marriages — can become expensive
burdens on household budgets.
Paying for benefits which should be federally
provided is an extra level of stress
not experienced by heterosexual couples.
Americans, especially veterans, should not
have to choose between payment and pain
because employers discriminate against
certain sexualities.
Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal
and others have correctly called on the VA
to end its policy of prejudice.
VA Secretary Eric Shinseki wrote in
response to the senator that his agency will
continue to recognize only different-gender
couples until the Department of Defense or
president mandates otherwise.
Postponement until higher powers dictate
direction is evasion of responsibility.
However, if VA officials are gutlessly
passing on accountability to President
Obama or the Department of Defense, then
either of those offices should order immediate
change. Otherwise, an egregious
injustice persists against a particular subset
of veterans.
As aptly argued 18-year Navy veteran
Carmen Cardona in an Aug. 16 AP news
story, ongoing bias is offensive on several
levels: "... the principle, the freedom ... We
are veterans. We deserve it whether we are
gay or heterosexual."
"The majority of the families are very ready for this. It's time for
something really beautiful to be there."
— Gina Russo, the president of The Station Fire memorial foundation about building
a permanent memorial on the site of the blaze that killed 100 people.
"It’s the right thing to do. There’s been so much negativity and this is a
chance for the residents of this to city to come together, even if it’s only for
one night."
— Cathy Gagnon, a Park View Manor resident in Woonsocket speaking about
Thursday night’s Block Party.
"No boots on the ground.”
— President Barack Obama speaking about a possible strike against Syria after
the Assad regime launches a chemical weapons attack that killed more than 1,400.
The Call/The Times/The AP
Obama and MLK,
a tale of two leaders
A speech at the Lincoln Memorial, on
the 50th anniversary of perhaps the greatest
American speech since Lincoln breathed
his last, is a speechwriter’s nightmare. It is
comparable to crafting Memorial Day
remarks for delivery at Gettysburg, or coming
up with a new angle for a speech at
Pointe du Hoc. The historical stage is
already fully occupied. It is like lighting a
bonfire on the surface of
the sun.
The Rev. Martin
Luther King’s “I have a
dream” speech was not
only an example of
skilled rhetoric; it was
also a moment of culmination.
It was the culmination
of a literary form:
Michael Gerson
African American
preaching — practiced
by four generations of
the King family — with its weaving of the
King James cadences, folk spirituals and
patriotic texts. It was the culmination of
America’s defining historical struggle: a
century of African American demands for
the fulfillment of national promises made
at emancipation, betrayed during
Reconstruction and mocked by segregation.
And it was the culmination of a distinctly
American type of leadership: the revolutionary
conservative. The speech managed
to be both radical and reassuring —
demanding freedom now, precisely because
our founding ideals admitted no other
course.
This fulfillment of craft, history and
leadership seemed less like a speech than a
birth, or, more precisely, the kind of national
rebirth that also took place at
Gettysburg. Both Lincoln and King demonstrated
the most remarkable power of rhetoric:
the power of trauma given meaning.
Both summarized and summoned forces
beyond themselves. Georg Friedrich Hegel
talked of a “world spirit” that mediates universal
ideals through the instrument of
great men. King and his contemporaries
saw a different spirit at work. Before his
Lincoln Memorial speech, an aide told
King, “Look, Martin, let the Lord lead you.
You go on and do what the Spirit say do.”
During President Obama’s Lincoln
Memorial speech, he affirmed that “no one
can match King’s brilliance.” And the president
wisely did not try. But his speech
showed signs of serious craft. Obama paid
homage to King’s cadences — “Because
they kept marching ...” — without straining
to compete with them. He found a way to
mention his own historical role — “and,
yes, eventually the White House changed”
— without sounding messianic. And he
subtly downplayed comparisons to King by
Don’t miss UPS & DOWNS
on Sunday’s Opinion page
drawing attention to the movement that
produced the March on Washington —
“men and women without rank or wealth or
title or fame” who would “liberate us all.”
The most instructive contrast is not
between two speeches separated by half a
century but between two leaders. In 1963,
King was introduced by A. Philip
Randolph as “the moral leader of the
nation.” Obama is a successful but polarizing
Democratic politician. King sought to
focus and sharpen ethical choices; Obama
takes pride in seeing moral complexities.
King set out a millennial vision of equality
and national healing; Obama talks of health
reform, the minimum wage and helping the
middle class.
This shift in leadership is, itself, a kind
of historical fulfillment. No president can
be a millenarian moralist in the same way a
preacher can. The nation would quickly
grow tired of trumpet calls and church
bells. With great power come mundane
responsibilities.
But Obama’s speech showed some of his
signature weaknesses in the discharge of
those responsibilities. His tone was inclusive
and gracious — until he considered his
political opponents. They marshal “an army
of lobbyists and opinion makers” to undermine
the interests of working families.
They tell us that greed is “good,” and
“compassion ineffective,” and that those
without jobs or health care have “only
themselves to blame.” What possessed the
president, in the midst of a fine speech, to
employ language appropriate to the
Democratic National Convention?
However accurate or inaccurate you regard
these charges, it is not a good sign when
polarization seeps into ceremonial celebrations.
Another weakness was also on display.
President Obama is correct in his diagnosis
of the economic challenge that lies beyond
legal equality: “Upward mobility has
become harder.”
And he is correct in identifying the
drags on mobility — failed education, broken
families and the structural problems
caused by technology and globalization.
But his time in office so far will hardly be
remembered as a period of innovation in
encouraging opportunity and the creation
of social capital. The president can blame
Republican obstruction. But that does not
explain the general absence of creative policy.
As the president said, we have traveled
far since the March on Washington, only to
arrive at different challenges. But our politics
seems unequal to them on every side.
Michael Gerson is a syndicated columnist
for The Washington Post.
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