Tuesday, January 20, 2015

The content of our character


Martin Luther King Jr., lived for the proposition that "all men were created equal," for the vision "that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

He also died for that proposition, that vision, that dream.

And it is for that "last full measure of devotion," to quote Abraham Lincoln, another great American who died because of a noble vision, that we honor Rev. King this time every year. To again borrow from our 16th president, King called us to heed "the better angels of our nature."

This trait in national leaders today is so rare that we are obligated to celebrate those who called us to transcend our fallen human nature all the more. It's important that we acknowledge that spark of the divine within us during an age when so much of the world seems to have gone to the devil.

Sadly, because we humans are a sad, sinful and petty lot overall, King's dream has yet to be fulfilled. Things are better, yes, than when an assassin cut down the civil-rights leader, but they're not good enough. Far too often, we judge one another by the color of our skin, not the content of our character.

That recently has been brought home right here . . . at home, in Omaha, Neb.

ENTER A small-time local Republican politician, Pat McPherson, recently elected to the state education board. McPherson seems to be one of those politicians who just can't help himself, or stay out of trouble. The content of the man's character seems to be, well, questionable.

More than a decade ago, there were allegations of groping a teenage girl dressed as the Red Robin mascot at a chain hamburger joint. McPherson, after a criminal trial, got out of that scrape, though not before he was pressured to resign as Douglas County election commissioner.

Now, after being elected to the Nebraska State Board of Education in November, McPherson is in trouble over his blog, The Objective Conservative. Several posts -- and McPherson has denied authorship or knowledge of the screeds . . . on his own blog -- refer to President Obama as "a half-breed," the latest coupling that derogatory reference with one to "our great Black Leader."
McPherson
Obama was described as a “half breed” in five separate postings on McPherson’s Objective Conservative blog — postings that McPherson said he did not author and that he disavowed after critics drew attention to them.

McPherson, a Republican, said they were posted by a contributor he would not name.

Three of the postings are written as if they reflect the opinion of the blog itself, which McPherson founded and said he co-edits. The three postings are listed as posted by Objective Conservative and are written with the pronoun “we.”

The three postings begin, “Frankly, we’ve had enough ...,” “We think Ted Nugent is cool ...” and “We are tired ...”

In one posting, the author jokes that the article may be their last because “we suspect the NSA has forwarded it to (Attorney General) Eric Holder for potential prosecution under hate-crime laws.”

The postings date back to May 11, 2011. McPherson said he deleted them from the site Tuesday. He declined to identify who wrote the blog posts, but he said he has expressed his disappointment to that person.

The chairman of the Nebraska Democratic Party said Tuesday that Ricketts “just flunked his first test as governor as he failed to ask for McPherson’s resignation.”

“How will Mr. Ricketts explain to schoolchildren and teachers why it’s OK with the governor for a State Board of Education member to have a racist blog?” Vince Powers asked.

Powers said McPherson either wrote the posts or is covering for the person who did.

He described the posts as “garbage.”

McPherson said Tuesday that he will “absolutely not” resign. He said he plans to shut down the blog and has blocked any new postings.

McPherson is a former Republican Party chairman in Douglas County who served as director of administrative services under former Omaha Mayor Hal Daub. He ran for the State Education Board on a conservative platform.

The blog, which claims to present a conservative view, is a hodge-podge of photos, articles and opinion. Much of the content needles Obama, Democrats and their policies.
ONE REFERS to an animal as a "half-breed." One does not respectfully refer to a human being that way. That, you could presume, goes double when the subject of your remarks is the president of the United States.

The term is biracial, one that could describe any number of McPherson's own constituents.

The temptation here is to launch into a grand dissertation about the wrongness of McPherson's views, the brazenness of his bile-spewing (and, seriously, no one really takes McPherson's disavowal of the contents of his own blog seriously) and how tragic it is that we Americans no longer can disagree with our fellow Americans without resorting to branding them as The Other. That ought to be bloody well self-evident.

The extent to which the obvious no longer is in this society is a direct indicator of how untenable it has become. Translation: We well may be on our last legs.

What else is self-evident -- or should be self-evident -- as this King Day winds down in Omaha is that Omaha-area voters messed up badly in electing not only a racist to public office but a man who didn't even have the decency to be a hypocrite about it on the Internet. A man whose public past ought to have given the electorate a pretty good idea about his public future.

Sadly, American voters oftentimes are just as foolish as those they put into office. Or bigoted, as the case may be.

FINALLY, it is self-evident that Pat McPherson is just another boil on the buttocks of American democracy. Worse, he is a cancer on the administration of Nebraska elementary and secondary education. It is a pity -- a tragedy, really -- that public disorders like McPherson are too often tougher to excise from the body politic than they are from the human body.

Martin Luther King's dream lives. But his work remains unfinished, thanks to human frailty, hearts of darkness and the politicians who exploit both.

In the name of King's dream and our future, we cannot afford to be content with characters like Pat McPherson. Either their day is done . . . or ours will be soon enough.

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