YP Letters: Obama still striving for the Martin Luther King moment

From: Terry Scanlon, Texas, USA.
Barack Obama addresses America after the shooting dead of police officers in Dallas, Texas.Barack Obama addresses America after the shooting dead of police officers in Dallas, Texas.
Barack Obama addresses America after the shooting dead of police officers in Dallas, Texas.

I JUST wanted to compliment Bill Carmichael on his excellent opinion piece ‘How Obama widened US race divide’ (The Yorkshire Post, July 22).

I am currently visiting family in Netherton, Yorkshire, but spend most of the year in Texas, where I have lived for many years.

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Of course, I read The Yorkshire Post every day that I am home in God’s own county.

Bill has done a great job of weaving together the salient aspects of Obama’s total failure with regards to creating a bridge, and leading a path, towards healing the racial divide.

On this subject, Obama believes that making a speech once in a while with his version of soaring rhetoric is a problem solved.

For one who has ceased aspiring to greatness, because he believes he is already there, he has never grasped the management maxim that words have to lead to clear actions that deliver effective results.

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He has cowered away from leading by example in the black ghettos of Detroit or Chicago where his presence could have been a lightning rod for the start of effective change; preferring to pontificate safely from a distance and paint a not-so-subtle picture that we, the vast, hard-working, family-centric majority, are somehow responsible and are all closet racists to boot.

And, I would posit, what history will eventually record is that as Obama strives ever harder for his Martin Luther King moment – his most recent attempt being his self-indulgent speech at the memorial service for the brave, dead Dallas policemen – he will utterly fail in his pursuit of this moment.

His hubris will forever be a barrier to him realising that the great man didn’t lean on carefully staged, safe moments to glorify himself, but rather a quiet courage to be the vessel, the messenger, for change even when his very life was in harm’s way working down in the trench of race relations. Or, as we say in Yorkshire, at the coal face.

I hope you will allow that I have sent your excellent piece on to Charles Krauthammer and Laura Ingraham, both well-respected, conservative commentators in America; both of whom I would encourage you to read.

From: Andrew Mercer, Guiseley.

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GIVEN the prevalence of firearms in the United States, how depressing that this issue does not even register in the US presidential election now under way between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Can they not agree to work together on gun control?