The path to a more perfect union…

If there was any doubt before, I sure hope this squelches it.

From Obama’s speech regarding race in the United States:

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

I can’t remember the last time I felt so inspired, so confident that change can happen. Anyone who says words are just words, that they’re not powerful enough to move mountains, strong enough to patch a past filled with misdeeds and forge ahead into the future, isn’t grasping the hope that those words can instill.

The full text is at The Huffington Post. I urge you to read it.

This was lovingly handwritten on March 18th, 2008