Many people have praised the speech Obama gave yesterday. But other reactions to it have left me depressed.

I used to be optimistic and idealistic about the power of dialogue to change the world. If we could all empathize with other people more, I thought, the world would be a better place. (Empathize: identify with, and understand, another’s situation, feelings, and motives.)

I used to think that only children were in thrall to their fears and emotions, and that when they grew up into adulthood, the fear would go away, and it would be replaced by understanding.

But it strikes me that so many adults in this world are actually just children in grown-up bodies. They are people who can lift heavy objects, and reach the top shelf, and drive a car, and hold down a job, and make a living, and raise a family. They are people who can generally function in this world day to day, independently. And yet so many of these people haven’t really grown up. They’re still too much in thrall to their fears and emotions. And it prevents them from understanding the world. From knowing the world. From knowing the people in it.

Obama gave a wonderful speech yesterday — a speech, by the way, that he apparently wrote himself. (That shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, he wrote a highly-praised, nuanced and deeply felt book back in 1995, when he wasn’t a politician and wouldn’t have had motivation to use a ghostwriter. And he was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review, so he’s not exactly an idiot. Maybe he received input on the speech from others — I haven’t seen it reported that he did, but maybe he did — but even if he did, the thoughts were his. It’s not like someone pushed a sheaf of paper in front of him and said, “Read this.”)

It’s not an easy speech to digest. You have to do a little more work to understand it than you have to do with most politicians’ speeches. It’s only words, but it demonstrated a fine understanding of the racial divisions that contribute so much to mutual suspicion and animosity in our country today. And, not incidentally, Obama also did a fine job, I thought, of explaining that sometimes, you have emotional ties to people in your life who may say things and hold beliefs that you profoundly disagree with. You might choose to shun these people. Or you might choose not to shun them, because even though you disagree with them, they’ve become like family to you, and you prefer not to shun family.

And yet some people think it’s their place to judge Obama for the choice he’s made.

I was particularly frustrated by a comment to a post on Eric’s blog. (I don’t know Ryan, the commenter, so I take issue only with his words, and only because those words are representative of what other people have written elsewhere on various blogs in the past 24 hours. I don’t mean to criticize the commenter himself.)

Ryan wrote:

I did read the speech. And I still don’t care. Actions speak louder than words and as a gay, I walked away from hateful religon, so can Obama, esp. when “unity” is his buzz words. So the world being complicated doesn’t “cut the mustard” so to speak. Wright is wrong. Obama sat and listened to his spew for 20 years. There’s no excuse. None.

[…]

Obama’s ACTIONS have spoken louder than any fancy speech his writers write. He supports hateful Wright, for whatever reason Wright is angry. I care not.

Hate is wrong. Wright preaches hate. Obama supports that hate by donating to his church, by attending his sermons, by naming his book after one of those sermons, by bringing his daughters to hear him preach.

End of discussion.

End of discussion?

That’s a level of certitude I can’t imagine holding. About almost anything.

I’m tired of reading comments by people who think it’s their place to judge how another human being handles a particular situation. As I said, I’ve seen similar comments on numerous blogs in the last 24 hours, and it frustrates me to no end. People are coming to a situation with their preconceived notions, and they won’t let anything change their minds.

I’ve been guilty of this myself, of course. In this political season, I’ve felt a visceral dislike of Hillary Clinton over the last couple of months, and I’ve expressed it on this blog. I’ve been trying to combat that dislike. I can’t presume to know what’s in her heart or her mind. I don’t think she’s an Ambitious Dragon Lady; I think she has deeply held, deeply felt beliefs about health care, and about children, and about making this country a better place. I don’t know if she has the political skill to achieve her goals as president; she might be deluding herself, as all politicians do (including, perhaps, Obama). And I think she’s made some dishonorable political choices in this campaign. My primal instinct is to hate her guts and hold her in contempt for the way she’s conducted it. But I’m trying to get past that, because, really, what the hell do I know?

“What the hell do I know.” I wish more people lived by that creed instead of feeling secure in their certitude. I try to, even though I’m not nearly as successful at it as I’d like to be.

There have always been wars and there always will be. There have always been dictators who weren’t loved enough or secure enough as a child, and there always will be. Throughout history, a large portion of the human population has remained childlike, and a large portion of the human population always will.

Why bother with the dialogue and the words? What good can it do? Damned if I know sometimes.

While writing this, it was pointed out to me that tomorrow would have been Mr. Rogers’s 80th birthday. (In his honor, tomorrow is “Won’t You Wear a Sweater?” Day.)

I adored Mr. Rogers as a child; sometimes he seemed to be the only person in the world who wouldn’t judge me, who would accept me unconditionally. He taught us some of the most emotionally healthy lessons there are. Here are some:

Of course, I get angry. Of course, I get sad. I have a full range of emotions. I also have a whole smorgasbord of ways of dealing with my feelings. That is what we should give children. Give them … ways to express their rage without hurting themselves or somebody else. That’s what the world needs.

You know, you don’t have to look like everybody else to be acceptable and to feel acceptable.

I have a very modulated way of dealing with my anger. I have always tried to understand the other person and invariably I’ve discovered that somebody who rubs you the wrong way has been rubbed the wrong way many times.

If more people were like Mr. Rogers, the world would be a better place.

Barack Obama gave an amazing speech about race and religion in America this morning. Appropriately, he gave it at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, because it was a very American speech. You can read it and I’m sure you can watch it somewhere [update: here].

It blew me away. I’ve never heard anything like it from a presidential candidate. I’ve never heard a politician speak so honestly, intelligently and insightfully about the racial and religious divide in this country.

It appears to have been prompted by the Rev. Wright comments. But he used the opportunity to speak not just about Rev. Wright but about larger issues. He explained the source of Wright’s anger without justifying it. He explained what Wright has meant to him personally, even though he thinks many of Wright’s views are deeply flawed.

He said that while Wright’s views come from a place of anger, so do the views of many working-class white Americans who blame their place in life on affirmative action, or who resent, rightfully, the implication that they themselves are somehow responsible for this country’s history of slavery.

I don’t even know what part of the speech to excerpt here, because passage after passage is insightful. Here’s a taste.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS…

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

I think this is going to go down as a legendary speech, on a par with Kennedy’s 1960 speech about his Catholicism.

Obama could have disowned Wright and quit his church. It might have been the easier thing to do. He could have been that calculating. Another politician might have thrown his friend overboard. But Obama has principles. He stood up for himself and defended someone who has played a meaningful role in his life.

I wonder if Obama is too smart and insightful to be President of the United States. But then I think to myself how wonderful it is that we finally have a candidate who doesn’t treat us like idiots – who has enough faith in us to appeal to the better angels of our nature.

I don’t know if that faith is justified; it might be proven wrong. But it’s so refreshing to see a politician take that gamble.