After Shirley Sherrod

Thankfully, things are working out well for Shirley Sherrod. There is still justice of some kind in the Universe. But there is no justice in a political atmosphere dominated by lies and hated, countered only by the weakest of push back.

Some of us are trying to fight back with what we have--words--hoping to raise awareness and motivate us to action. David Michael Green posted this yesterday on OpEd News (excerpted here):

This week saw the ignominy of the Shirley Sherrod case, in which regressive hitman Andrew Breitbart blasted across the media a doctored up video of a speech the black former director of the Agriculture Department's Georgia state office gave, decades ago, talking about how she transcended her own impulses to discriminate on the basis of race. Transcended, I say again. But that was the part that got edited out. It was as if you lost your job because you said publicly that "I am not a terrorist", but some right-wing freak (whose parents evidently neglected him as an infant and we're all paying for it still to this day) took out the third word of the sentence and gave the rest to your boss and wife and kids and everyone else, and now you've lost your marriage and family and home and job and no one will talk to you anymore.

What this illustrates for the umpteenth time . . . is that the scum that is today the American right will absolutely say and do anything in order to score political points, while so-called progressives say and do nothing even to stop their crimes, let alone to advance a positive agenda. They do nothing, that is, unless crumpling up like frightened kittens in a thunderstorm counts as doing something. . . .

(W)e're like a two-bit drunken banana republic, thrashing about in the gutter of history as we implode from the toxic combination of greed, stupidity, indolence and hubris.

We once used to conduct a war on poverty. Now we just incarcerate the impoverished. In privately-owned, for-profit, jails . . . .

It's been nearly half a century since JFK so aptly reminded us, "Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality."

And yet we remain well ensconced in the first category.

The problem is that we have yet to define exactly what actions we need to take, beyond speaking up and challenging right-wing lies. But speaking up is a start, a way to begin to act on our convictions and challenge the political tide that is carrying us deeper and deeper into a very ugly place.