Succinct Sullivan

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Question The Village doesn't want to face:

If Charles Graner is in prison for following orders, why is no one accountable for giving them?
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Fatherhood: Teachable Moments and Uncomfortable Truths, Part 2–Accountability

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Barack Obama chose the setting of the other African American Chicago mega-church to deliver his Father's Day conversation about dads and accountability. He had held his own spiritual father, the man who guided him to his faith, at long last accountable and walked away.

Some say he waited far too long. But letting go, as we see in many venues in the world as well as our own lives, can be a hard thing to do, no matter how difficult the circumstances.

Consider the many families where the dad, beset by alcoholism or chemical dependency, falls short of what he could be as a father and a man, and still the family rallies around him, organizing treatment, doing whatever they can to try to help him heal. We see it in the tabloids, but it's a too-harsh reality in too many families. Made worse by recession and joblessness and catastrophe and loss.

Did you know that Fedex Ground truckers are independent contractors and it's coming out of their pockets at the gas pump...not Bushie's, you know, base. Dads, working long hours, rigorous jobs, carryin' on their shoulders the burden so the corp executives don't have to trouble their beautiful minds worrying about their stock options.

Obama spoke of Accountability for fathers who abandon their children. "Any fool can make a baby." It takes a man, said he, to raise one.

And he spoke with authenticity, too. For he is a man raising two daughters in a strong family and marriage. A man who knows what it is to be abandoned by one's father, to lack the connection to half your life, half your heritage. A man who, on graduation day, could not look out across the audience and see a dad's beaming pride.

Obama speaks to all of us, not just the black community, although that is where the statistics say the greatest problems are. But if you are a child being raised without a dad, it doesn't matter the color of your skin.

Some say, well he's just a political opportunist havin' a Sister Souljah kinda moment. Sorry, that won't wash. It's the authenticity, man. And the reality that his life's work has resonated with the community activism which builds strong families.

Or, Bill Cosby was saying the same thing and he was castigated for his pains. Maybe it was the wrong voice. Maybe he lacked the street cred because of his own shortcomings about family, maybe the time was not yet ripe.

Surely, for problems so great, many voices, many hands, many hearts must draw together to make change happen. And if the best leader to achieve that change is a younger man, in the fullness of strengthening his own family while building strong community, rather than the older man, so be it.

Change won't come easy. Not on this problem, not on too many of the other problems this great nation faces. America is the abandoned child of a self-indulgent ideologic drunk-on-power father these days, a man who blithely ignores the havoc he has created in the American family fabric as he parties on. It will take the rest of us to nurture up the child and guide her to greatness despite the father.

With the guiding hand of a loving man who values and understands all the realities of this nation and says, we can do better.
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Thugs Walk Among Us

There’s a sorry videoclip making the rounds of YouTube—a deputy tipping a quadriplegic man out of his wheelchair, facedown so he can see it coming, onto the hard concrete floor.

I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch it. Our family knows what it is to be wheelchair reliant, and frankly it’s a little like gawking at an injury accident scene along the highway. I just can’t look.

But I can listen, and this morning I heard the defense attorney for the deputy lamenting that all that YouTube coverage means his client can’t get a fair trial.

Cry me a river.

I want an outraged jury. I want them to look. And decide based on the cold hard facts. Not let the woman off the hook because the facts show her for the thug that she is. And no better are the sniggering deputies around her.

We live in a thug culture these days. It starts at the top. A little shoot an old guy in the face and get away with it here. A little waterboarding and Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and other tortures there. And gaming the legal system. Trying to backdate the laws, skirt the responsibility, withhold the evidence, rationalize the blame—boogga-boogga, ticking timebomb anyone—and you’ve got a whole societal norm that extends from the Oval Office right down to the local sheriff’s office saying, hey, we’re the law, we get to do whatever we want. And get away with it.

And look where it gets us.

The media play no small role in this situation. This morning, instead of telling us anything about FISA, for example, the Morning Mouths are giving us More Hill, Less Bill, then proceeding to wallpaper Bill all over the airwaves.

When there were voices loudly crying out against the use of torture, including voices of WW II vets and professional interrogators saying it does not work…including a Senator who has lost his way who knew first hand torture did not work…those voices were given short shrift for more of the BushCo spin. And media consciences were shut down for whatever reason they told themselves—bad for the corporate bottom line; it’s unpatriotic; it’s treason; oooooh, it’s hard and it gives me a header… but no reason excuses such compliance.

Meanwhile, who watches the watchdogs when they’ve been so watered down and hamstrung and w-ussified by Bushie that they’ve lost their will? The Congress, the media are both complicit in the thug culture. But so has been the rest of the country. Fear worked, for a while.

It’s not just the Congress that needs a spine, it’s every last one of us. We’re working on it, and so far, we’re looking pretty fair. And Congress may even be sitting up and taking notice.

And it’s important cleanup work we have to do. Because when a country is debased, when people are made beasts, then they have lost their claim to leadership and honor in the world community…and in their own hometowns.

Accountability matters.

So give that deputy her day in court. If I were on the jury, I’d sentence her to every payday for the rest of her life write out a check to that man in the wheelchair. Doesn’t matter the amount so much, it could be one dollar. Let him collect a bigger compensation from the government that failed him…and all of us. Let's all of us wheel a mile in his shoes.

There’s a segment of the country that believes dinosaurs walked the earth with man some six thousand years ago. As long as thuggery is ennobled, for whatever excuse, they still do.