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The Harris Philosophy
With Two Glosses And A Terrible Error
The last time I felt certainty about the rightness of our leaders, and the path forward they proposed, was August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
I was 17.
Since then, we’ve had some earth-breaking policies and feckless leaders, and some hamstrung good leaders. We have as a nation not led the world in education, health care, equality of opportunity or of access to resources, humanitarian policies, dismantling of colonialism, encouragement of democracy, or environmental, ecological, and climate restoration.
The fact that most U.S. history books don’t discuss these ethical, moral, foreign and domestic policy failures, that they are not taught in schools, and not discussed in depth on television, does not mean that the people who do talk about them are wrong, or radical, or communist. It means that the majority of Americans are dismayed when they first learn about racism, sexism, corruption, and U.S. complicity in genocides, ecocides, and kleptocracies.
But comes now the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz candidacies for president and vice-president of the United States, and their stated philosophy reminds me again of the songs, words, and hopes of that March on Washington of August 1963. 250,000 people sang We Shall Overcome…