Dear Governor Patrick:

This supporter and volunteer still stands by you… but it’s been hard, and I fervently hope to hear you once again taking up the moral leadership that so many of us invested in you as governor of our Commonwealth.

I volunteered many hours helping you win the nomination and then the election because you had explained to us all what a “Commonwealth” means: that we all share in a common civic, economic, and political life, and that we are each others’ keepers.

It was time for us to face tough questions about whether “Commonwealth” was merely a word, or represented our actual commitments. And we and you all knew that at the end of the day, this meant that we would have to consider reasonable, fair, and sustainable sources of revenue to enable the Commonwealth to keep its promise to all of us.

You were able to connect revenues — or let’s just be clear here now, taxes — to values that we all share: better education, health care, services, infrastructure. So when you were elected, I was ready to take up the cause and join with you to close corporate tax loopholes and then embark on a serious conversation with my neighbors across Massachusetts about what our own commitment might mean.

I hope you can therefore understand my disappointment when, since last summer, you instead pursued an unfair, unsustainable, and immoral source of revenue from casinos. I know that we need the money, and we need it badly. But going down this path meant losing your moral legitimacy. It took us off the idea that taxes represent our shared commitments and instead echoed the false belief that we can magically meet the state’s needs without personal sacrifice.

So rather than putting my energy behind supporting all that you stood for, I instead worked against you to battle casinos in Massachusetts. And I take no great satisfaction in winning.

But the fact is that the issue is over, and I for one and ready and willing to again join with you again in seeking reasonable solutions to our Commonwealth’s fiscal crisis. It is not an easy task, but we didn’t elect you to take on the easy tasks. We supported you, urged our neighbors to vote for you, and ultimately elected you by an overwhelming majority because we have faith in your ability to lead us through the difficulties ahead.

I still have faith in your ability to do just that. Please don’t let me down.

Sincerely yours,

Gene Koo
Cambridge, MA

Sozi Tulante is a close friend of mine from college and law school. He’s a Congolese refugee, married to a British woman, and lives in Philadelphia. In short, he’s an American, and I’d like to post his response to Senator Obama’s speech from Tuesday:

I am writing to ask for your support. Yesterday morning, I was fortunate to be in the audience for Senator Barack Obama’s speech – really a discourse – about the role of race in American culture, history, and politics. Quite a heavy topic. Yet Senator Obama managed to pull it off, with nuance, grace, honesty, and balance, and in doing so gave a speech that will define a generation. Listen to or read the speech yourself, more than once if you have to.

The speech was hastily arranged, and invitations sent out with less than a day’s notice. So we expected, like any politician would, that Senator Obama would carefully jettison Reverend Wright, issue some safe bromides, then cross his fingers and pray that the issue would be considered settled. That is not what happened. Rather, he explored in the most personal and direct way possible the centrality of race, the quintessential American dilemma, and both the challenges that it poses to us all – Black, White, Asian, Latino – as well as the opportunity it gives us to start healing our racial divisions in honest – and sometimes painful – ways, beyond Benetton ads or videos of the Black Eyed Peas. I know his speech may not settle every skeptic, but, as someone else said, “Agree or disagree with Obama, I ask people who are less inspired by him than I am to at least acknowledge that in this presidential candidate, we have a man of honor–and an honest man.”

Here in Philadelphia we have started taking up the challenge that Senator Obama issued and started having these discussions about race. And over the last weeks, after work and on weekends, rain or shine, Meriel – an Oxford-born professor and linguist — and I – an Ivy-League educated, North-Philly raised Congolese refugee and cab-driver’s son –have asked hundreds of people to embrace Senator’s Obama’s vision for change and register to vote. Despite efforts by hundreds of volunteers like us, there is still much to do as the polls show Senator Obama trailing. Although we can always work harder, to close the deal the campaign needs funds for the next five weeks of canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts. Please contribute by clicking on the following link or if you cannot contribute kindly pass this e-mail along to someone you think would contribute:

Contribute to the Obama campaign

Anyone will tell you that listening to Senator Obama is a singular experience. Yesterday, though, there wasn’t the celebratory, whoopin’ and hollerin’ or the speech-interrupting-applause you find at the typical Obama event. It was more solemn, though no less inspiring. It is as though the 160 members of the audience – of all races – and the those watching on television or on youtube knew that on this occasion Senator Obama was only asking that we lend him our ears and attention for 40 minutes.

As Senator Obama pointed out, the history of race in America contains some of this nation’s most powerful moments, but also its most profound failures. Both these strands form the core of America. It’s true that “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Yet, yesterday morning he showed how he would handle a crisis: directly, calmly, and confidently, and in a way that addresses all Americans. He also signaled that we no longer have to wait for a while yet, maybe a long while yet, because the time is now, the place here, the people us. Please join us!

Best,

Sozi

Co-Chair Young Lawyers for Obama – Philadelphia Chapter

P.S: Below are my immediate thoughts on the speech:

New York Times
New York Sun

Sozi is, by the way, the guy holding the Obama sign in my earlier post about PA.

While Senator Obama’s address on Tuesday has largely been received as a call to national dialogue about race, the 37-minute speech also revealed much about his religious and spiritual views. In it, Obama clearly invokes core Christian principles and beliefs, from original sin to God’s grace. “Perfection” was his refrain – he invoked the word nine times – yet he did not use it to describe a teleological achievement, but rather a continuous mission of going on to perfection.

This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.
[emphasis added]

Salvation, in this view, is an ongoing process, not an outcome; a constant exercise of choice rather than a final destination. Known as “Christian perfectionism,” this idea is a cornerstone to the theology of John Wesley, a leader of the Methodist movement. Interestingly, the most powerful Methodist today – George W. Bush – appears to profess a very different view of perfection, one that involves accomplishing specific goals based on knowledge about God’s plan for the world:

The cause we serve is right, because it is the cause of all mankind. The momentum of freedom in our world is unmistakable–and it is not carried forward by our power alone. We can trust in that greater power who guides the unfolding of the years. And in all that is to come, we can know that His purposes are just and true.

Bush professses a theology of certainty: God’s will can be known — indeed, it has been revealed to us — and our task on earth is to realize it. By contrast, Obama offers a theology grounded in a process, not an outcome: to work out salvation with fear and trembling.

Obama’s professed beliefs puts him at odds not only with President Bush, but his own pastor. As he states emphatically, “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is… that he spoke as if our society was static.” Christian perfectionism, by contrast, sees imperfection as God’s challenge rather than fatalist destiny.

Some pundits and bloggers continue to ask why Sen. Obama has stood by a pastor with whom he disagrees so vehemently. There is, of course, a first-pass answer in the speech itself: “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother” — uncomfortably close, perhaps, to the reality of Hillary standing by Bill. Yet Obama makes clear that he is not just standing by an old mentor and father-figure, but an entire community: black Americans. “These people are a part of me,” he says of the American black community, a locution that implies both identity and yet also separation – acknowleding that Obama had come to the church as an outsider and made a conscious decision to stay and belong there.

This loyalty to a community that Obama acknowledges is both strong and imperfect invokes another theme related to perfection: reconciliation.

Our current notion of post-conflict reconciliation is largely informed by the work of Bishop Desmond Tutu in healing the wounds of South African apartheid. Today, there is a practice and a process of reconciliation that’s widely studied, refined, and applied across the world. Sen. Obama’s speech reflects two steps in this process: acknowledging of the merits of both sides and suggesting options for redress.

Bishop Tutu’s practice of worldly reconciliation was rooted in Christian belief in a divine one. And for Christians, Obama’s decision to devote himself to the imperfect community of black Americans may just echo another outsider who chose to stand with a broken people. For Christians believe that God sent his only son to become fully human in order to redeem the world; through Jesus, Christians find reconciliation with God.

Critics who perceive Barack Obama as “messianic” may be on to something, for as much as he asks America to join in racial reconciliation, he cannot help but embody that reconciliation in himself. Obama, of course, is not Jesus, and we will not achieve redemption – worldly or otherwise – by believing in him. If Americans are to heal our racial divide, we must commit ourselves to a process and not just a person. And yet this one person may just have the right message for the right time to begin that process. Perhaps for an issue as intractable as race in America, a leap of faith is all that is possible in an imperfect world.