Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness around the world.

April 16, 2008

 Today’s Announcement

Call for submissions:  Storytime Tapestry is in need of more stories, please keep them coming in.

Help support the continued running of Storytime Tapestry join me on mylot and get paid while we talk to each other and others all over the world:  http://www.mylot.com/?ref=winterose  if the link doesn’t work just cut and paste

From my son Steven Roach:

I was thinking you should advertise the link regularly in your newsletter if the link doesn’t work just cut and paste

 
http://greenhorse.com/join_now.ghc?r=177952857
 
tell them it would help support the newsletter and they can earn money from it. They need to sign up and install it but they don't need to do anything else. They just do what they normally would anyways on the net and they earn money while it’s on. In other words they just keep it running while they are online. It’s small doesn't take up much system resources and they can earn more if they advertise their own link and get people under them as well. Let them know some people make 5-10$ a day on it and its been open since 2002. 

Don’t forget to order your copy of Angels Watching Over Me, the story of an ordinary woman facing less than ordinary challenges.  Angels Watching Over Me is a story of family love, sacrifices, poverty and an undying faith that makes heroes out of all of us. Here is the link in case you have forgotten it: http://www.lulu.com/content/964306

Important notice: Storytime Tapestry is a free e-zine, however donations are always needed to help with the operating expenses of running the newsletter and to keep Storytime Tapestry the quality newsletter you are so accustomed to.   You can make your donations to paypal at: winterose@videotron.ca, or if you would prefer to use the mail system contact the publisher at the same email address: winterose@videotron.ca

 ~**~**~

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OBAMA AND WHITE GUILT

Duane Bates

Barak Obama delivered a speech focusing on race relations in America after the firestorm of controversy surrounding the wide viewing of the videos of his Pastor, Jeremiah Wright, delivering sermons that upset and angered many. Wright’s sermons condemned the historic maltreatment of African-American by the institution of slavery and one hundred years of legal and de facto segregation in terms that angered many Americans. A link to the full text of the speech is posted below.

David Broder, the Washington Post columnist, feels the speech did a service to the nation in that it could result in a more positive, healthier debate about our dark history of slavery, segregation, lynching and institutional discrimination at every level of our society. And, more importantly, it asks the question as to how do we complete the task of making our nation “a more perfect union” where every person has a real opportunity to achieve whatever they define as success without barriers based on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion or any other artificial constructions.

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, on the other hand, saw the speech as a cynical attempt to appeal to ”white guilt”.  His column accuses Obama, by his refusal to leave Wright’s church, of actually continuing to “infect” the young African-American generations with negative racial attitudes.

Two of the most important emotions for humans to learn and experience in order to become properly socialized are empathy and guilt.  The absence of these two emotions often foretells a troubled childhood and adult life.  Empathy means the ability to feel and understand the emotions and situations of others.  Guilt is the feeling we get when we have, either by commission or omission, violated a moral, ethical or legal standard.

I believe the term “white guilt” means the collective guilt that that white Americans supposedly feel when confronted with the historical reality, and its continuing impacts, of our treatment of African-Americans through slavery and segregation.  Krauthammer and others invoke this claim because they believe that Americans cannot vote for an African-American like Obama based on his qualifications alone, there must certainly be some element of white guilt, conscious of unconscious, in their decision.  This is, of course, nonsense, but political agitators like Krauthammer are not deterred by the actions of millions of white Americans who support Obama with their dollars and votes.

All the Americans who created, maintained and exploited our “peculiar institution” of racial slavery are long dead, but millions of African-American who were victims of the century-long legal and de facto segregation that began to end with the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s, and the whites that passively or actively supported it, are still alive. While progress has been made in providing equal opportunity in education, jobs and every other aspect of our society, much remains to be done.  African-Americans as a group still lag their white counterparts in every important indicator of social and economic achievement.  We have to give up the illusion that our nation’s long-term health and wealth can be secured by discrimination of any kind against any group.  

To paraphrase Gordon Gecko in the movie “Wall Street”, guilt is good.  A feeling of guilt, combined with the desire to make amends for your action or inaction that caused it, can be transformed into the motivation to change the way you think, feel and behave about the issue of race in America.  To recognize a feeling of guilt in yourself and not make an effort to confront and resolve it is self-destructive.  Warning:  you are only responsible for your own behaviors.  When I was working as a therapist I had patients who were wrestling with guilty feelings over things that were either created by dysfunctional parents or other authority figures in their lives or by circumstances over which they had no control. 

I do not feel any white guilt, but I do feel a heavy load of responsibility to recognize and do what I can to repair the damage done by our ancestor’s conscious decision to refuse to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment that allowed legal and de facto segregation to exist.  In 1952, when I was 12 years old, I quit the Boy Scouts when they would not allow an African-American friend of mine to join our Troop.  I was told that the Boy Scouts had separate Troops for “them”.  Even at the age of twelve I knew that the racism practiced by the Boy Scouts was wrong. Knowing what is right and wrong in any situation is usually easy.  Issues like race, religion, social status and money sometimes make choosing the right action complicated and difficult. We often trade short-term gains without fully understanding the long-term implications of our decisions.

 In 1970 when I was helping manage a Chicago firm my employer had recently acquired I refused to terminate a competent and effective African-American employee simply because he was a Black Muslim as requested by another, Christian, African-American manager.  I transferred the Black Muslim employee to my direct supervision and he continued to be a valued employee. 

In my personal and professional life I have always strived to live the letter and spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment and the other individual rights included in the Bill of Rights. I cannot claim those rights for myself without insisting on the same rights for every other person, regardless of the color of their skin, religion, age, gender or ethnicity.  The Constitution is not some piece of old parchment on display in Washington D.C., it is a living guide to how we should value, respect and treat each other at the individual and at all levels of our society.

Don’t vote for, or against, candidates because they are black, white, male, female, young, old, Christian, Jewish or whatever.  Make your choice on the basis of their positions on the very important issues facing our nation and the world.  This, and every, election is important to our, and because of our key economic position, the world’s stability and future.    

"All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing."  Edmund Burke

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race-speech-read-_n_92077.html

Duane Bates

batesduane@yahoo.com

Poetry Corner

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Take The Step

Conrad S. Cardinal

Most walk through life never looking
either way.
Never asking, can I be of help today?

An inconvenience, extending a helping
hand.
Much easier to bury ones head in the
sand.

Does the word selfish apply to you?
If it does, you can change, here’s what
you might do.

 Call a neighbor, say hello, let them hear
your voice.
By taking this step, you may be giving
them a choice.

A choice to share their burden instead
of holding it in.
A caring word may help their healing
begin.

Very few can stand alone in a time of
sorrow.
Take the step, do it know, don’t wait
until tomorrow.

Conrad
                           cconseth@aol.com

 ~**~**~

 Wake Up

Conrad S. Cardinal

Wake up America before it's to

late.

We are in danger from within, a

terrible fate.

There are those whose agenda is

our demise.

It's time to open our eyes.

Many are being lulled to sleep.

Led to slaughter like meek little

sheep.

 It's not what someone says that

reveals their goal.

It's their actions that give you a

peek at their soul.

So easy to say what you want to

hear.

Better examine what they hold dear.

Patriotism an important part.

Why choose someone we've doubted

from the start.

A belief in the God that has blessed

America these many years.

Not in a god that calls for death and

tears.

I challenge you to take a closer look,

before it's to late to get off the hook.

Conrad
                   cconseth@aol.com

  Mailbox

  As always Joe Mazzella  it was ssoooo good  Keep writing and sharing hugs Leona

Very good writing Joe Walker  keep on sharing  Hugs and God bless Leona

Here is our Storytime Tapestry Angels: Also, I would like to thank those of you who chose to be a silent angel and gave an anonymous donation to keep Storytime Tapestry up and running.

Clara Westerfer, Mark Crider, Rosanne Catalano, Paula Booher, Kay Seefeldt, Mariane Holbrook, Mary Ellen Grisham, Louise Nomani, Sharon Bryant, Angela Walker, Hart and Helen Dowd, Keith Ready, Ginger Morgenstern, Ellie Braun-Haley, Surinder Jandu, Bob Shaw, Carol Meeks, Charlotte Hilliard, Marilyn Sink, Victor Buhagiar, Clarice Hinson, Conrad