I've been reading some of
href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/AngieJ">Ebony's fiery prose; she's
someone I know from a list from way back in her undergrad days. I just found her
site though a link in another journal. (Thanks,
href="http://kiwiria.diaryland.com">Kiwiria, and yes I do think you shouold
keep writing!) Now she's on the front lines living what she believes in, and
probably doing more direct good in the world than I ever will. She's always
managed to both interest and educate me. I don't agree with some of her minor
points; for example, high black crime rates and low life expectancies may be
partly due to despair and stress respectively, but I believe you've also got to
give credit (discredit) to simple poverty and the overcrowding that goes with it.
Those things, though, don't diminish the force of her points, and in my
disagreements I am always uneasily conscious that I might be wrong on all of them.
It's hard to argue with someone who's living with the brutal and hard realities
that are so easy to opine about from the soft comfort of the White house -- or
from my comparatively luxurious home and office. (Er, I mean luxurious compared to
urban war-zone Detroit, not to the White House.) (I'm not dissing Detroit as a
whole; I'm sure many parts of it are not brutal. Some are.)
I found
myself wanting to respond line by line to amplify or point out something I thought
she'd missed. I had the same reponse to
href="http://batten.diaryland.com">Batten today, but in that case it was out
of disagreement. Funny, I think she and I agree on the very high level and on many
details; it's somewhere in the middle that we draw very different conclusions. We
agree on the need to fight for freedom, just not always on how or when. But it's
always worth debating with someone who thinks about her points, either to learn,
to teach, or to find common ground.