Cheers, Tears and Jeers

I really don't want to jinx anyone or anything on this, a Friday the 13th (as if stuff could get even more snake-bitten, right?) so I'll use small words and type quickly, putting a lot of pressure on you. Sorry 'bout that-take it for the team.

By now you know, the presumptive Republican Party candidate for President, Mitt Romney got roundly and soundly booed at the annual convention of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) earlier this week. A reaction which launched some remarkable intellectual exercises and analyses among the brilliant minds who troll the blogosphere (I'm just here for my looks, not my brains).

Moving quickly to my point, and this doesn't happen that often so savor it: might I suggest the incident was a 'no win' for both sides (can conversations about race in America even have sides?). The NAACP at some organizational leadership level felt the obligation to extend an invitation and, Mr. Romney, for whatever his reasons are/were (I'll admit I could only guess but never know, unlike a legion of pundits with no more knowledge than I have but a butt-ton of speculation) then chose to accept.

I read his speech-I even put some of it into my newest favorite discovery (after PolitFact), the sentence parser and I have to tell you, sometimes it was slow going. In fairness, I've put pieces of this stuff in there on a regular basis and watched in disbelief as the computer tried to pull its own plug out of the wall so that injunction about glass houses applies, seemingly (and about curtains, too).

I saw the same thing you watched-not a pleasant situation. I understand the disapproving disagreement and the means used to signal it. That's not what has me disquieted. It was a bad, bordering on lousy, situation for both sides and another example,like we didn't have enough already, of a nation's continued balkanization in matters of economic status, faith, gender, and/or race (I put them in alphabetic order, if you wondered and I don't pretend it's an all-inclusive list).

We used to stand for something-now we'll put up with anything if we can use it to advance our own short term, small minded goals, whatever they are. It seems to me, all the way over here in what I like to mentally sub-title, "The Only Sane White Guy Left in the Entire Universe's Corner," it's too bad for all of us that nobody is willing to take up arms against a sea of mostly self-inflicted troubles.

Ever since that last perfect person got crucified, we've been sullen if not silent. I guess we all really do have better uses for the wood.
-bill kenny