Thursday, August 09, 2007

"what's wrong with america?"

this question, posed by retired steel worker Steve Skvara at the afl-cio forum on tuesday, made me tear up. if you didn't catch it that night or in any of the forum recaps since then, watch it now - it certainly deserved the only standing ovation of the evening:



it evokes a very similar, and nearly instantly iconic, query made by Fannie Lou Hamer at the Democratic National Convention in 1964 (this piece, put together by two 12-year-old girls in california, is a great concise history of one of this country's most important and yet neglected civil rights figures - listen to the sound byte from her convention speak at minute 6:00, and take ten minutes to check out the whole thing when you have time):



why is it that the most simple questions are also the most difficult to answer? why are they the ones we are so afraid to try to answer?

1 comment:

Dewey said...

Thanks for posting these. I'm glad I got a chance to watch them.