you are not who you thought you were

Grayson EXPLODES on GOP: "America doesn't CARE about your feelings" Man On Fire!
Congratulations President Obama on the Nobel Peace Prize -- Now Please Earn it!
30+ Reasons Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize
WTF? You have to be kidding me... this is a joke (a mostly incoherent rant about the evils of Bush and why Obama really deserves the Nobel after all . . . I think)
A Moment To Be Bold
If Rush buys Rams, some Black players won't play
Do sex offenders deserve to live? (on the reclist!)
CO2 now highest in 15 million years: catastrophe looms

Should we bomb Iran? FOX poll.
Obama Should Donate His Nobel Prize Money to the Nat'l Assoc. of Free Clinics
Iran’s Supreme Council Declares Ahmadinejad Nobel Winner
9 months is enough time for Obama to bankrupt the country, but too soon for a Nobel Peace Prize
Limbaugh wants to buy biggest Democratic backers in the NFL
Where Obama Could Donate His Prize Money
An Ironic and Poorly Conceived Front Page Diary
The Anti-Bush Nobel Peace Prize
I admire Barack, but the Peace Prize?
Quit your cowering! Grow a god damn spine. And CELEBRATE this great honor!
FL Repubs: It's Our Right to Shoot at Arab Silhouettes
We should have won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Obama: The Prize, The Work, The Reality
Anti-Gay Animus in Full View in Washington State

But these are not three disparate movements with three different practitioners, three different conspiracy theories that simply happen to share the same summertime stage. In practice and organization they are one movement, a single collection of the same set of animated citizens and televised leaders, and their signs decrying fascism, Naziism, communism, taxes, euthanasia and outrage over 1960's-era Hawaiian government paperwork mingle freely at every protest . . . They are nearly exclusively white, predominantly middle aged and elderly, and unambiguously conservative. Many of those shouting against their government are already participants in the same "socialized medicine" they decry, but to a person will not consider their Medicare to be of that evil ilk . . . It is, in short, a movement made up of the enfranchised and enabled; people who have gained every benefit from the politics of America and yet who feel in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones, the ones who have nothing left to lose, so rapidly is America falling away from them. It is rare to run across any movement so deeply angry -- or more to the point, a movement which explicitly celebrates anger as the primary mission of their activism.

[...]

It seems at first a bizarre thought, a mere freeform hiccup of the brain, but between a half-dozen different commentators I am apparently already far from the first to have it: it seems to me like the last time we saw public discourse be as intentionally devolved as it is today was during, of all things, American desegregation.

After all, I stand here today, as president and as an African-American, on the 55th anniversary of the day that the Supreme Court handed down the decision in Brown v. the Board of Education. Brown was of course the first major step in dismantling the separate but equal doctrine, but it would take a number of years and a nationwide movement to fully realize the dream of civil rights for all of God's children. There were freedom rides and lunch counters and Billy clubs, and there was also a Civil Rights Commission appointed by President Eisenhower. It was the 12 resolutions recommended by this commission that would ultimately become law in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

There were six members of the commission. It included five whites and one African-American; Democrats and Republicans; two Southern governors, the dean of a Southern law school, a Midwestern university president, and your own Father Ted Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame. They worked for two years, and at times, President Eisenhower had to intervene personally since no hotel or restaurant in the South would serve the black and white members of the commission together. Finally, when they reached an impasse in Louisiana, Father Ted flew them all to Notre Dame's retreat in Land O' Lakes, Wis., where they eventually overcame their differences and hammered out a final deal.

Years later, President Eisenhower asked Father Ted how on Earth he was able to broker an agreement between men of such different backgrounds and beliefs. And Father Ted simply said that during their first dinner in Wisconsin, they discovered that they were all fishermen. And so he quickly readied a boat for a twilight trip out on the lake. They fished, and they talked, and they changed the course of history.

I will not pretend that the challenges we face will be easy, or that the answers will come quickly, or that all our differences and divisions will fade happily away. Life is not that simple. It never has been.

But as you leave here today, remember the lessons of Cardinal Bernardin, of Father Hesburgh, of movements for change both large and small. Remember that each of us, endowed with the dignity possessed by all children of God, has the grace to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we all seek the same love of family and the same fulfillment of a life well-lived. Remember that in the end, we are all fishermen.