‘Barack, I Didn’t Do It for This’: An Homage to Andrew Goodman
What would satisfy you, Mr. Simon? Should Barack, for the sake of satisfying polemical rhetoric that has met polemical rhetoric, denounce the very soul of Rev. Wright? What would you ask him to do? Barack admitted, VERY CLEARLY, in his speech that his church housed the best and the worst, the most ignorant and the most inspired, the entire spectrum. If you would rather sit back and enjoy your own cynical and facile demagoguery than enjoin the fact that this spectrum is what we find in the smallest communities and the largest cities, the most liberal of advocacy programs and the most conservative think-tanks, in your home and in mine, well, Mr. Simon, that is your prerogative. Just remember that your ‘poem’ could never have been speaking for you, because you didn’t ‘do’ anything. Or you could choose to set aside cynicism DESPITE all the reasons that call for it, and respond in kind when a fellow human, even if it is one you don’t really like, recognizes that FIRST OF ALL and BEFORE EVERYTHING ELSE, we stand on this ground in this country facing each other as humans, and that if we choose to begin from somewhere other than that, we will never find that more perfect union.
