Aimless wanderings in the Egyptian heartland. Part Six- Rafah and Ismailiya, a study in contrast

Garnata is the most beautiful beach that I have seen in my life… and I have seen a plenty of them… from the Kovlam, Vagator and Devgarh on the Arabian Sea to the Ayanapas, Dahabs and Sharm El Sheikh elsewhere… Garnata is Mediterranean at its best.

I must have walked the stretch of the beach for hours… lost in my thoughts…. Trying to talk with myself… one of my best friends and the very best listener of the banter is my wife… and for some time now she had left for India… and therefore I was always pent up with a lot of unexpressed thoughts…. Garnata gave me an opportunity to speak them aloud… mull them over and to self advise myself. Such is the power of loneliness… miles and miles I didn’t see a human being apart from a lone fisherman adjusting and readjusting his fishing line and some small kids playing with the splashing waves… these companionships added to the romance of being lonely.

Time loses its bearings when you are enjoying the bliss… it either becomes too short to enjoy or a moment brings a elongated stretch of happiness… in my opinion, the former attribute of time does not bring out the best in you… it underlines us as a desireful human being… the latter is pure bliss… I walked in soliloquy for hours and hours and then after a while when I checked my watch… it had been a little more than an hour. The beauty of nature… the catharsis of loneliness and eloquence of my self had nourished me soulful. It was time to go and to let go.

My next stop was Rafah… Rafah is a border town in the Gaza Strip… and it's only contact with the rest of the world… its narrow opening to the world of hope and opportunity. The rest of the Gaza Strip is surrounded by a sea of hostilities, Israel. And not that the Rafah Crossing is friendly either… it's sometimes even more hostile than that 'sea of hostilities' called Israel. Some months ago it was taken over by the radical and much more popular Hamas… and therefore isolated from all sides. It has since then been a constant source of threat for Israel… launching rocket attacks on it. And therefore had been seized and blockaded. The Palestinians face enormous amount of difficulties and rely a lot on Rafah. Only that these difficulties are multiplied due to unhelpful attitude of Egyptian government.

One needs to take a shared taxi to Rafah crossing… and as Maghawary had warned me, it's indeed a heavily protected area… every few kilometers your credentials are checked and being a foreigner brings you under a constant barrage of question. Luckily those days Rafah was having a bout of peaceful times. And therefore the authorities were a bit less skeptical about the fact that an Indian is trying to travel to Rafah without any sense of purpose.

Rafah, however, turned out to be a disappointment. There was hardly anything to see or do there. It was even more a ghost town than El Arish. People later told me that there are a few Palestinian refugee camps that are heavily guarded, they have in them Palestinians who were driven out of Gaza Strip and therefore have no place to go. They were mostly Fatah supporters. A similar such thing is happening in the West Bank too… but the Hashemite government in Jordan is a bit more sympathetic. In any case, it was virtually impossible for me to meet any of them.

The over burdening security apparatus in Rafah is palpable. Far away I could see the Gaza Strip… it was a scene that would be sketched in my memory forever. I was seeing the theatre of the longest standing political of the human civilization, a problem that threatens to swallow us in a vortex of violence. A few months ago, I met Austrian diplomat and he was remembering that how 23 years ago when he started his career in Egypt (that was 1984, and Israel had invaded Lebanon), the centrality of global polity was Israel and Palestine… and how even after 23 years the same remains true. I hope that after 23 years of my existence this does not hold true.

I came back to El Arish and started for Ismailiya… my plan was to somehow reach Dahab by the night.

Ismailiya is a very pleasant town… a town of gardens and greenery. People who hail from the Canal area often term it as the most beautiful place in Egypt. That may be a bit of a superlative for I have seen much more beautiful places in Egypt… Dakhla for instance has an enticing raw beauty that most of the touristy destinations do not have; same goes for Dahab that has a carefree beauty about it. But Ismailiya is definitely a beautiful place… and more than that it is a place full of beautiful and young girls… as I was told, that Ismailiya has a lot of educational institutions that serve the entire Canal area, so a lot of students from all over the canal area travel to Ismailiya… students from Port Said, Qantara, Port Suez etc. And all over the place, I saw lots and lots of young boys and girls traveling to and from Ismailiya…

When I reached Ismailiya bus stand, I realized that the bus to Dahab is late in the night at 10 pm… so I had all the time in the world to see Ismailiya… it was only 4 pm… I hired a cab and gave him 20 Egyptian pounds to show me entire Ismailiya; he took me to the house of De Lesseps, the maker of the Suez Canal and to the Canal. The town is really very beautiful… and a nice place to take break from Cairo or even the more unaesthetic Suez and Port Said.

The driver took me to a Kushri shop, which he claimed served better Kushris than the more famous shops of Cairo… I, however, begged to differ. I have a doubt and that too a strong one that somehow Kushri and Kichhadi of India are related, ingredient wise they have an uncanny resemblance… rice and lentils… One Egyptian was telling me that there is a very strong relationship between Kosher and Kushri… as Kushri devoid of any meat and milk was kosher diet for the Jews of Egypt…

After the round through the town… I waited eagerly for the Bus to Dahab… that went there via Port Suez and Sharm El Sheikh. At 8 however I found a bus going to Sharm El Sheikh and boarded the bus thinking that it would be a faster way to get to Dahab; that however was my folly as I discovered later on.

I was off to Sharm El Sheikh, bidding adieu to the serenity of Ismailiya.

Have I really improved

Ever heard of Flesch/Flesch–Kincaid Readability Tests…

According to the wikipedia

"They are readability tests designed to indicate comprehension difficulty when reading a passage of contemporary academic English. There are two tests, the Flesch Reading Ease, and the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level. Although they use the same core measures (word length and sentence length), they have different weighting factors, so the results of the two tests do not always correlate: a text with a higher score on the Reading Ease test over another text may have a lower score on the Grade Level test. Both systems were devised by Rudolf Flesch."

The first indicator Flesch Reading Ease decides how easy is to read a particular piece of writing- thus an indicator of the flow of narrative. The simpler the narrative, more logical the narrative… the higher the Flesch Reading indicator….

The second indicator Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level indicates what level of eruditeness is required to read a given piece of writing… thus a text which a fifth grader can read will necessarily be better than a text that requires a graduate to read, given the same content. Here lower the indicator, the better.

These indicator are at best empirical… and there is no rocket science behind them… therefore they should not be taken at a face value… they are indicative, but give very good results.

A random excerpt from my favourite book- Catcher in the Rye has a Flesch Reading Ease of 80.7 and Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level of 4.8, great isn’t it.

Similarly a random excerpt from Alchemist… has a Flesch Reading Ease of 73.4 and Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level of 6.6..

The idea being that a good book generally is simple to read and that one does not need to put a great effort to read them.

People tell me that over the time that I have blogged, my writing has become simpler and eloquent… is it just a compliment or a truth.

I tried to check myself with the above indicator. I applied these indicators on a three part series that I wrote in the initial phases of my blog… "WHY BLOG". The scores were Flesch Reading Ease of 34.9 and Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level of 12.

And then I applied the same indicators on the last three parts of my latest blog series on "AIMLESS WANDERINGS IN THE EGYPTIAN HEARTLAND". The scores were Flesch Reading Ease of 59.9 and Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level of 9.7.

There seems to be an appreciable improvement in my writing style… my writings have become easy to read and require a lower eruditeness to read… way to go. So after all these compliments were not way off the mark.

Before I part… if you want to check your scores… you can do it on MS Word. Type your pieces on MS WORD… go to tools… and then options… and in that Spellings and Grammar tab… check the SHOW READABILITY STATISTICS box and you are done. Check your spellings and grammar… after that is done, the readability statistics will automatically be showed.

I vote for Barak Obama

Admittedly, I am not even bothered to follow the ongoing rage on the CNN. Who wins? And why to bother.

For me… McCain, Obama and Hillary are all alike. Hillary harps on being the first women President… albeit she derives the advantage of being the first lady not so long ago. McCain position is hardly enviable… calling himself a Vietnam War hero… a war that every nation should feel embarrassed about. Millions of poorly and unarmed Vietnamese were massacred by Agent Orange and unethical war tactics… and yet McCain does not fail to evoke a national pride out of the tragedy.

And then came Obama… he was black… something abominable and daring to dream. The first peek into him… and I discovered a child in him… a dreamer, a hyper… not the greatest person to be the most powerful man on the earth… till I went through his speech on Racial Discrimination.

A good leader transcends artificial boundaries… that artificial human models impose on him. If today, I fondly remember Abraham Lincoln, Napolean Bornaparte, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela as my role model… it is because their persona… transcended the nation state boundaries, ethnic boundaries... etc. They will forever be etched on the times lines of humanity due to their ability to give a universal vision to humanity.

It will be too early to put Obama in that category… but his speech is one of the finest I have ever come across in my life… the message is so universal, so pure and so beautiful… it makes me salute the mind that has conjured up the message... and it is none other than Obama…

The speech goes like this… it is a long speech…a very long speech, but if I had to request just one thing to be read in my blog… it would be this speech. Please do read it.

And then see the universal message of the speech… in India… one has to change the race with caste, and union with the world fraternity enshrined in the preamble of our constitution.

"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.
This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.
This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.
Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.
This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either "too black" or "not black enough". We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarisation, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.
And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.
On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.
I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.
But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.
As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic healthcare crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.
Given my background, my politics and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way
But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than 20 years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a US Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over 30 years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.
In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:
"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters … And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about … memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."
That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding and baptised my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like healthcare, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote: "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, 50 years after Brown v Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.
Legalised discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late '50s and early '60s, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognising they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.
For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances - for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans - the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives - by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.
Ironically, this quintessentially American - and yes, conservative - notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright's sermons But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old - is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know - what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realise that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.
In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathise with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say: "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st-century economy. Not this time.
This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have healthcare; who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.
This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should've been authorised and never should've been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.
I would not be running for president if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.
There is one story in particularly that I'd like to leave you with today - a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King's birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.
There is a young, 23-year-old white woman named Ashley Baia who organised for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organise a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.
And Ashley said that when she was 9 years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her healthcare. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.
She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.
She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.
Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother's problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn't. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.
Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say healthcare or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."
"I'm here because of Ashley." By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give healthcare to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.
But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realise over the course of the 221 years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.