IBW21

President Obama´s second State of the Union address must be considered in the context of important economic and political factors. On the economic front, though the “Great Recession” appears to be over, the recovery is anemic, leaving millions of people unemployed, underemployed, with large numbers of people also abandoning the labor market. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans continue to be adversely affected by the home mortgage crisis. Both phenomena fueled a mood of anger, frustration and despair that the Tea Party Patriots and Republicans were able to exploit to score stunning victories in the 2010 Mid-Term Elections. Republicans captured a substantial majority in the House of Representative, reduced the Democrats majority in the Senate, elected 21 Governors and won control of 19 additional state legislatures. President Obama called it a “shellacking.”

The task of the prophet in the time of angst is to caution against revenge. It´s calling friend and foe alike to the numinous-or, simply saying there is another way. Our contemporary age has been shaped by anxiety-inducing events-ecological calamity, fiscal insecurity, and arbitrary terror. Ecological disaster strikes indiscriminately; the international fiscal crisis has engendered collective experience of economic demise; wars of revenge elevate the presence death and despair in…

In the middle of this year´s Black History Month I was momentarily overcome by a weird feeling. There was a kind of ho hum, mundane, routine, business as usual atmosphere about this year´s commemoration with little passion or intensity. Maybe it was just me, but I had a sense that Black History Month was/is straying from Carter G. Woodson´s original mission of utilizing history as an instrument of restoration and liberation for people of African descent in the U.S.