Talk the Talk

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Words mean something, says Barack Obama, challenging Sarah Palin and the rest of the hate-spewing McCainiac team. "You can't just make stuff up."

Yes, words mean something.

Caroline Kennedy talked about how her children influenced her. How she sees in Barack Obama a sense of purpose and a quality of leadership that she has not seen in decades...a quality of leadership, she has been told, that reminds people of her father.

Words mean something.

So how about you? Have you had the conversation? Oh, I don't mean with other bloggers or commenters who agree with you. Nor with the folks you've met volunteering or canvassing for Obama.

Have you had the conversation with your own family? With your parents? With your grandparents?

The Sunshine family is now four generations strong...crossing party lines...but united in support of Barack Obama.

Because words mean something.

And images and "character" can be tissue thin--whether moose leather or $300,000 crass couture--while issues must be faced with honesty and truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and no dissembling. Hypocrisy must be called out and rebuked. Racism and race-baiting must be shamed and shunned.

And it's not easy. The words don't slip off our own tongues as glibly and grinningly as a speech-written teleprompter's script. We struggle sometimes, telling our own parents or grandparents, aunts or uncles, why words mean something.

And honesty, as well.

And it may seem sometimes that we're in this alone, mocked by the Republicans, with a self-important puffed-up McCainstream media that too often shows that it is either hopelessly gullible and stupid and easily guiled or caring more for the face in the mirror than the face of real journalism instead of stenography or infotainment "news."

Because to think the agents of change will be the ones who got us in this mess for nearly eight long years is to be as vapid...and fearful...and self-dishonest...and flat-out screwed-up shallow as the cravens on the right are hoping that voters will be.

Their drumbeat will be loud, but we have the chance, each and every day, to have dinnertable conversations and talk the talk.
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