From a friend: Can we please stop talking about Reverend Wright...NOW?

I got an email the other day from a friend. I read it and thought, this is what the blog was for. I changed up some of the paragraphing to make it easier to read online. Here's what she wrote:

Friends, please indulge me a moment on my soap box..... (apologies!)

As the country talks endlessly about Rev. Wright, what he has said and what Obama has or has not said about him, 24 public school students in his city of Chicago have been gunned down this school year. I just watched this photo gallery... real kids with real stories, not just demographic info in an article.

This is not a Hilary vs. Obama issue I am stumping, I am trying to emphasize the misplaced dialogue in this country. We need to talk about urban warfare in our country... kids taking bullets and firing bullets....

Why are mill workers in NC or unemployed manufacturing workers in PA the only people that matter in this campaign? I am not saying that they shouldn't matter, they should and they do, but who's talking about the kids in Durham, NC who are gunning each other down on the street?

I know its not what gets people votes, I hear that.... but, really, this is shameful. And the ugly truth of it is that each one of those 24 kids was black or Latino. We say that we as a country are talking about race now... that we are really open to it and people feel good if they can still support the black candidate amidst all this controversy. But we are not talking about it all.

50 bullets fired by the NYPD, killing Sean Bell and wounding two others.... and the officers walk out of the courtroom acquitted of all charges, assigned to desk duty in Gramercy Park. As a good friend said to me on Friday, its easy for one to excuse 50 bullets (and a reloading of the weapon) when one does not have to worry that someday a police officer could make an "error in judgment" and shoot 50 bullets at them. She's right.... there is little chance that that could happen to me. I just wish everyone could have the luxury of not having to worry about that.

And this culture of impunity within the justice system does nothing to help dispel the "stop snitching" message which is so antithetical to ending youth violence in places like Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Brooklyn. It is all part of the same problem...... the Sean Bell verdict makes it even harder to encourage kids to speak up about guns, speak up about who killed a kid on the street, speak up about who fired those bullets that went through an open window and killed a nine-year-old sitting on a couch. Who wants to talk to the police? It doesn't even matter anymore if Cam'ron thinks its uncool.... it's just plain hard to justify talking to the ones who "shot that man in Queens with 50 bullets."

And so, the silence and "lack of cooperation with the police" will continue... and the killers of these 24 Chicago kids will go unpunished and continue to enact violence on the streets.... or go to prison instead for petty drug crimes for a couple of years and come out angrier and more violent than before (and perhaps have contracted HIV in prison due to a lack of prison-issued condoms).

This is what we should be talking about..... Instead we go on and on about the Reverend from Chicago--- who incidentally talks to youth about elevating themselves, making better of their lives, becoming "self reliant"--- yet we are more concerned with what he said about the government and AIDS five years ago, or what he said on 9-12-01, or what he said about Farakhan yesterday.....