Seeing how it moves others makes it even more impressive - I was particularly taken by the response of Roger Cohen, the South African-born columnist for the International Herald Tribune. Cohen doesn't mention the words truth and reconciliation, but one could: Obama's offering a reconciliation based on truth about America's racial past and present. I've expressed my worries that people (including myself) are more drawn by the idea of Obama than by Obama himself, but with this speech I realized that even my idea of the idea of Obama was too narrow - and his way of offering truth makes the practical work of reconciliation possible and necessary.
Not a representative bit, since the speech works as a complex whole, but interesting:
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.
I'm suspicious of "genetic makeup" arguments for all the usual reasons (and religious studies lights are flashing on the salvific ritual power of that which brings together all a society holds apart) but as he uses it - as he lives it - it seems like real promise of a wholeness in diversity which one might, coming from a more "genetically conventional" candidate, dismiss as mere pie in the sky. His feet are on the ground, our ground. Read the whole speech; it's what living ideas sound like, including the idea of America, rumors of whose death have been exaggerated.