Dear Gov. Palin: Critizing Obama's Community Work Insults Us All

"The history of America has been largely created by the deeds of its working people and their organizations. Nor has this contribution been confined to raising wages and bettering work conditions; it has been fundamental to almost every effort to extend and strengthen our democracy."
--William Cahn, labor historian
"Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."
--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dear Governor Palin:

Last week, at the Republican convention, you chided the
democrat's presidential candidate for president Barack
Obama for having been a community organizer. You said it was a position with no real responsibilities. But the daddy is writing to tell you three things only a politician working for the rich and a politician attempting to score points to get into office like Palin would make such an ignorant, anti-progressive comment.

Let's be clear: what you really said is that Barack, a graduate of one of the best law schools in the country, an individual who turned down a lucrative income from numerous prestigious law firms to organize unemployed steel
workers and the poor in public housing on the South side of
Chicago, had no responsibilities and was engaged in work of little, if any, importance. But in your attempt to demean Obama, you did something more: you revealed your vast ignorance of the immense and invaluable role that community organizers played and continue to play in the development of this country. Clearly, you have little or no knowledge of abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglas,
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth who ended slavery; union
leaders like John Lewis who got rid of child
labor and gave us health benefits and retirement packages,
overtime pay other benefits; the Betty Friedans, Gloria Steinams and Ida B. Wells who organized so you, a woman, could get the right to vote; the Dr. Kings, Ella Mae Bakers, Bayard Rustins and Fannie Lou Hamers who, though beaten, jailed and murdered, brought an end to apartheid in the southern part of the United States; the Cesar Chavezs' who fought and continue to fight to bring the discrimination and near slave-like conditions of farm workers out of the shadows and to give them full economic and human rights.

But your ignorance and insensitivity to community work and its importance in the development of this country is not the worst thing. Worst of all is your utter insult to black Americans. After all, it is Black Americans who have had to organize and fight continuously and so long to achieve rights and respect that most white Americans take for granted. Indeed, one could argue that it is this struggle, this community work, that is our greatest legacy and our greatest gift in this country. Therefore, in insulting Obama's community work, you, in essence, insulted the historical legacy of an oppressed people who he represents and a struggle that is shared by so many, a struggle that has, at last, gotten this country to a point where the son of a single mother who once used food stamps was nominated the presidential candidate for a major party in the United States.

Besides reading up on your American history, there's only one other way for you to atone for your reckless and ill-informed remarks: apologize to Mr. Obama, his family and the American people for demeaning a history of community work that has made this such a great country.

Sincerely,

Mac Walton, aka. the daddy