With the GIVE Act passed in the House, and the Serve America Act moving toward a vote in the Senate, it’s a great moment for President Obama wrote a major essay in TIME magazine, “A New Era Of Service.” The President takes a tour of his own history as a community organizer, and the bipartisan history of service that has brought us to the brink of a new era. And he concludes with an explicit call to all Americans:
In the end, I have no illusions about the magnitude of the challenges we face. But I have no doubt that we can meet them if we each do our part. So I urge you to get involved, right now, at this defining moment in history. I’m not going to tell you what your role should be; that’s for you to discover. And I won’t promise that it will always be easy or that you’ll accomplish all your goals all at once.
But as I learned in the shadow of an empty steel plant more than two decades ago, while you can’t necessarily bend history to your will, you can do your part to see that, in the words of Dr. King, it “bends toward justice.” So I hope that you will stand up and do what you can to serve your community, shape our history and enrich both your own life and the lives of others across this country.
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Larry Pinkney, BlackCommentator.com on Obama:
This is a man who has enjoyed the fruits of America at the blood and expense of Black Americans and others, but who has paid virtually no dues.
This is a man whose father had also enjoyed the fruits of university schooling in America but subsequently returned to his native Kenya.
This is a man, who also like his father before him, neither served in a branch of the US military nor in any organization in America opposed to US military adventurism.
This is a man who as a deeply corporate military industrial complex US Presidential candidate, has called for “unilateral” US military actions in other nations. [And why not? After-all, his father, himself, or his wife and children were not and will not be the ones killing and being killed.]
This is a man who, in Chicago, pretended to support the human rights of the Palestinian people but who is now known to be a huge supporter of the apartheid Zionists and their powerful and insidious political lobby in America.
This is a man who dares opportunistically to feign admiration for the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but does not share the collective memory, pain and deep concerns of Black America, other people of color, or even of numerous white Americans for that matter - in the ongoing struggle for equality and justice in this nation.
This is a man who has de facto contempt for the past supreme sacrifices made by thousands of activists from so-called “militant” organizations such the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), the Student National Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party (BPP), Students For A Democratic Society (SDS), the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), etc.
This is a man who is silent about the need for reparations for Black American descendants of slaves and the genocide of the indigenous so-called “Indian” peoples on this continent. He is the consummate opportunist who, in reality, cares nothing about the horrors inflicted upon Black, Brown, and Red peoples in this nation, and has repeatedly signaled that he plans to inflict even more “unilateral” military horrors upon various nations and peoples of the world.
This man, Barack Obama, is but a more articulate, younger, and shinier version of the current and infamous US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, adorning himself dangerously and abundantly in superficiality and double-speak.
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