In the November, there is the national election, and one ballot measure that will encourage me to share my thoughts and encourage people to join me in electing the next President, and making sure that the Georgia Governor’s Opportunity School District amendment is defeated. There is a link between the election of our next president and the campaign to defeat Georgia’s Opportunity School District. I’ll explore that in more detail in coming weeks.

Here I want to focus on the Presidential election.

I did watch the Democratic National Convention, at least the parts that interested me. And wouldn’t you know, I missed the one speech that I believe echoed the ideas that many of us believe in. It was the speech given by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, President of the North Carolina NAACP.

To me, it was the Speech.

Dr. Barber’s speech goes to the heart of our democracy, especially when he says:

There are some issues that are not left versus right or liberal versus conservative, they are right versus wrong. We need to embrace our deepest moral values and push for revival of the heart of our democracy when we fight to reinstate the power of the Voting Rights Act.

He then goes on to say:

I might not normally be here as a preaching an individual but when I hear human voices and positions are here and I know she is working to embrace our deepest moral values and we should embrace her. But let me clear let me that she nor any person can do it alone. The watchword of this democracy and the watchword of faith is we (emphasis, mine).

In an article he published in the Nation about a year ago, Dr. Barber calls for a movement based on moral fusion.  Indeed, he is the force behind this movement, which he describes this way:

Since the social, political, and economic system of slavery was defeated by progressive Northern white families aligning with hundreds of thousands of African slaves and freed people in the South in 1865, The Nation has fought to repair the deep breaches this system created in the human family of the nation. Today, when Southern legislatures have fallen to Tea Party zealots, the need for a Southern-oriented anti-racism mass movement is greater than ever. The Nation will continue to play an important role in building this movement in the South, and explaining it to the rest of the nation.
We need a transformative movement—state-based, deeply moral, deeply constitutional, pro-justice. We need to build for the long-term, not around one issue or campaign.
We need the kind of language that’s not left or right or conservative or liberal, but moral, fusion language that says:

• It is extreme and immoral to suppress the right to vote.
• It is extreme and immoral to deny Medicaid to millions of poor people, especially when denied by people who have been elected to office and receive their own insurance through that office.
• It is extreme and immoral to raise taxes on the working poor and cut earned-income tax credits, especially in order to slash taxes for the wealthy.
• It is extreme and immoral to shut off people’s water in Detroit.
• It is extreme and immoral to end unemployment compensation for those who have lost jobs through no fault of their own.
• It is extreme and immoral to resegregate and underfund our public schools.
• It is mean, it is immoral, it is extreme to kick hardworking people when they are down.

Here is his DNC speech.  I hope you will take the 10 minutes to listen to this man, and then consider what this might mean to you.  I hope you can see why “I’m for her.”