John Hope Franklin, who died yesterday at 94, was one of the most remarkable Americans of the 20th century. He was the master of the great American story of that century, the story of race. John Hope wrote it, he taught it, and he lived it. ...
But John Hope always looked at the state trooper blocking the bridge, the figure standing in the way of freedom, and saw there another child of God. He knew, as Charles L. Black Jr. said, that the tragedy of Southern race relations was drawn from that "prima materia of all tragedy: the failure to recognize kinship."
-- Walter Dellinger*
This "failure" is repeatedly shown to be one of our biggest problems. We fail to follow words from our birth certificate:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
This sense of interconnectness was an important theme in Mariane Pearl's book too, and comes to me all the time. So many things for me seem interconnected, so the fact we all are as well, including in an intimate kinship sort of way, seems rather natural for me. Not all the time, yeah, but enough for me to hope it matters. This is not always the norm.
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* We are told that "The writer is a lawyer in Washington." Yes, and also the head of the OLC and acting Solicitor General during the Clinton Administration. You know, nothing worth mentioning.