So very thankful for the lives, wisdom and grace of Jimmy and Rosayln Carter...
“A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It is a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.”
“America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense… human rights invented America.”
“We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.”
“Failure is a reality; we all fail at times, and it's painful when we do. But it's better to fail while striving for something wonderful, challenging, adventurous, and uncertain than to say, " I don't want to try because I may not succeed completely.”
"the main thing I want to impress on the listeners today is just to use every influence you have to encourage up more attention being paid by banks and by city governments and by state governments and by the federal government to making housing available for everybody, decent housing."
6 comments:
To be clear, I'm talking about Jimmy Carter being the best, most moral, most decent man who's been president, at least in my lifetime. His performance as president can be debated (I don't think it's as bad as many folks think, but it's a debatable point). I'm just noting that there has not been a more overtly moral, devout, gracious, giving man in that office probably ever. Certainly in my lifetime. As evidenced by a lifetime of pursuing trying to help others with housing, with election protections, with peacemaking efforts, with health efforts, with building houses, etc, etc.
And I'd suggest that the second best human to be in that office is Barack Obama... the Obamas and Carters are, on the face of it, good, decent people and I think observably so. Certainly no huge scandals and certainly nothing like the overt indecency and deviancy of the incoming president. Just overtly good people from good families living good lives.
Craig and Marshal expected demonstrations and riots in the weeks after the election and especially today.
But Democrats do not deny elections. Democrats do not ignore governing a nation and representing the citizens of the nation. Democrats are handing over power. Vice President Harris is presiding over certification now and no one is running for their life. There are no ropes to hang her and Speaker Johnson. No Capitol Police officer will lose their life.Not even a broken window.
Decency and morality and leadership remains with one side only for the next four years.
And then what? When does this brutalizing Supremacist rage burn out? How many more years will be given to refusing to govern, refusing to give due diligence and recognition of the whole of the nation, taking only, taking rights and services and tax payer money to feed the rich and the glutinous oligarchs ?
And they think they can judge Jimmy Carter? President Carter was welcomed by angels. Trump by insurrectionists.
And I add, Dan, that when the Obamas pass over it wont just be angels but a host of martyrs, Christian and otherwise, who will eager to receive them in heaven. The Obamas did not carry just a Party, just a nation’s democratic life and will, and not just the stewardship of human civilization from the highest, most powerful, and - for the decent - most accountable governing position on earth. The Obamas carried the burdens of the sin of the United States, the infamy of its economic secret in becoming a set of colonies, a nation, an industrial power, and a Superpower. The millions sacrificed to colonization and capitalization will receive them in glory and joy. Not as any fulfillment of a nation, but as inheritors of the precious promises of their blood: that we may well finally become a nation of equal peoples one day.
And don’t kid yourself. As black people they are aware every day of dutifully living out that legacy in their lives.
Putting them second to anyone just continues the ways in which you demonstrate that you don’t yet have a strong clue as to what life is like being black in America.
Again, Dan, I join with you to honor Jimmy Carter. His record on anti-discrimination and anti-racism from the presidential office broke new ground in making progress toward equity and normalized presidential policy making at all levels of the federal administration. LBJ made heroic advances in law and social policy. President Carter leavened the rest of the span of government.
The necessity is obvious. Time has given a chance for researchers to study the motivations, conscious and unconscious, of the horde of white male insurrectionists on Jan 6. Decent thinking people lack shock that racism was at the core.
“Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, has been gathering information on rioters who faced prosecution for their involvement on January 6. He and his “little army of researchers” have analyzed 890 insurrectionists and the 439 counties in 47 states from which they came.
The rioters were 92 percent white and 86 percent male. Only 14 percent had extremist ties. But what especially jumped out to Pape and his colleagues was that more than half were from counties that Joe Biden won. The more rural a county was, and the more its voters favored Trump over Biden, the less likely it was to produce an insurrectionist.
There was another striking common denominator: The more a county’s white population declined, percentage wise, the more likely it was to send a would-be rioter to the Capitol.
“Race is the primary factor,” Pape says, accounting for “as much as 75 percent of the energy underneath the insurrectionist movement.” It’s not that the rioters were duped by Trump, but that his lies found fertile ground amid their fears.
“The word ‘disinformation’ is off,” Pape says. “It’s about demographic change and whether you’re afraid of it or not.”
In other words, even though race was not the only factor driving the insurrection, the data Pape’s team collected shows that white grievance was the primary motivator. “There’s a clear racial cleavage that you see in our data, and that is what is also captured in the ‘great replacement theory.’”
No offense to the wonderful Obamas. This is the sort of (slightly) hyperbolic praise of a saint who has passed on. There is no such thing as "the best..." There are all manner of things one might judge a president (or person) upon. Carter may have been better than another on this topic/issue/characteristic and another person might be better than Carter in ways. It's a fools errand to assume one might assume "THE BEST" on almost any topic.
The point I was making upon Carter's passing is that SOME presidents and national leaders and world leaders (the Carters, the Obamas, for instance) are clearly heads above others. There are no presidents in recent history to match the Obamas and the Carters in terms of sheer character and strength of decency. They stand above the crowd in so many ways as to beat back any competition.
Perhaps I should not have used "second" to refer to the Obamas. Again, no slight intended to those marvelous leaders.
And yes, we agree that Carter (and his wife) lead the way in decency, justice and human rights in many ways, as do the Obamas. And yes, we agree that many of Trump's supporters are motivated by their fear of being replaced and overwhelmed by people of color and their fear of losing "their" "America" that was never theirs in the first place.
The Carters had their Habitat for Humanity and human rights efforts that they've fought for over the decades, the Obamas have their Obama Foundation and other efforts they've fought for since leaving office and leaving the world in a much better state because of their leadership. These Nobel Prize winners are unique world leaders in a wide range of ways and I'm so thankful for their model.
The GOP and DNC are sorely lacking in people to fill their shoes. Especially the GOP, which has clearly given up all pretenses of being a group of moral, human rights loving people, of decency and "family values..."
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