Here are the comments I am delivering to our City Commission this week:

[Obamarama]

Citizens get four minutes each at the beginning of our city commission meetings to make general comments. I urge as many of you as possible to make similar pleas to your local leaders, especially in urban areas.

(A little background here, the commissioner I single out is a tireless advocate against poverty and racism)

Good evening Mayor Jones and city commissioners. I am here tonight to first thank commissioner Don Cooney, and then make a broader appeal to each of you.

Comissioner Cooney, I want to thank you for your relentless commitment to the issue of economic and racial inequity facing our city. There have been many times when I have agreed with what you have rallied for from that dias, but at times I wondered how such a broad, national issue could possibly ever be solved from a city government perspective. More than once I have likened you to Don Quixote, famous slayer of windmills.

Last week as tens of thousands of American citizens were left behind to literally die in the streets of New Orleans simply because they were too poor to flee from Hurricane Katrina’s destruction, the heartwrenching images and reports literally made me sick to my stomach. It cannot be denied that the conditions of poverty that cost many victims their lives – and all of them their dignity – are inextricably linked to the color of their skin.

It is no secret that we have the same, ugly combination lurking in our own city. I have always challenged racism when I have encountered it, but I am ashamed to admit that it took a tragedy on the scale we witnessed last week to really connect the dots between race and poverty in our society.

So, Commissioner Cooney, I encourage you to keep the dialogue on poverty and race alive at a local level. I hope my fellow residents will join me in holding each and every one of your fellow commissioners accountable for doing the same. If we don’t have important, meaningful discussion at a local level regarding this disgraceful condition in our society, there will be no hope for moving it forward to fill the vacuum of deafening silence at the highest levels of our government.

[prairierose]

1. That's a great comment...

please let us know what type of reaction you get.