When Reverend Wright stepped to the microphone yesterday at the National Press Club, he did so as the most controversial figure of this Presidential election year.

Wright pointed out that the sound bites played over and over again in the corporate news media were just a small slice of much larger reasonably argued points in his sermons.

For example here is the text of the speech leading up to Rev. Wright’s “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” remark which was part of a sermon Rev. Wright delivered to his congregation the Sunday following September 11^th, 2001:

“America’s chickens are coming home to roost! We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism! We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism! We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working fathers. We bombed Gadafi’s home and killed his child. “Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against a rock!” We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to payback for the attack on our embassy. Killed hundreds of hard-working people; mothers and fathers who left home to go that day, not knowing that they would never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye! Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children after school, civilians – not soldiers – people just trying to make it day by day. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans, and now we are indignant? Because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yards! America’s chickens are coming home to roost! Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism.”

If the corporate news media were to play that tape, they would have to devote hours to grappling with the factual charges Wright submits against the American Empire, and there is simply not time for that, and it would put the patriotism that drives this Empire in jeopardy.

Wright recently sat down for his first interview with the press since he was put under the media microscope.

In the interview he implied that somewhere along the way masses of the American public have been brainwashed into believing that the United States government is the supreme moral leader by stating, “Governments don’t say right or wrong, governments that want to kill innocence are not consistent with the word of God.”

A population who allows their morals to be dictated by their government is doomed to stand idly by as their government runs wild as the world’s super power.

When I heard Rev. Wright’s words I couldn’t help but recall Dr. King’s words from a 1967 speech against the Vietnam War, “Don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment and it seems that I can hear God saying to America: ‘You are too arrogant’…no it ain’t easy to stand up for truth and for justice.”

While Wright was hurt by the scrutiny that he received from the American corporate media and believed it was unfair, he seemed to understand why it happened, he said

“You are (by pointing out the truth of America’s sins) desecrating our myth; you are desecrating what we hold sacred,” implying that to speak the truth of America’s evil deeds has always been and is still taboo in this country.

It is in the best interest of the status quo to keep Reverend Wright as the angry black preacher shouting “God Damn America” to his predominately black congregation, because once a person sits him down and hears of or is educated on the clearly articulated events in history that justify his statement, the statement which seems so shocking when taken out of context, he is easy to deal with. But once you sit him down you open up Pandora’s box, the box containing America’s laundry list of atrocities.

It saddens me that Barack Obama decided to disassociate himself from Reverend Wright, but I am not naïve enough to think that Obama could embrace Wright and still have any hope at winning the Presidency. I am sure that Obama justifies the sacrifice of Wright with the hopes of what he believes he will accomplish if he is successful in his bid for the White House.

Wright himself also understands the necessity of Obama’s actions, saying that “Obama is a politician and so he is doing what politicians do.”

The discussion surrounding the Reverend Wright controversy was and continues to be basically whether or not Obama heard Wright preach the so called controversial statements, not much attention has been paid to the context of the sound bites and validity.

Is it possible that Reverend Wright is the hero that has finally publicly connected America’s past to its present struggles, could this start the long and difficult dialogue needed to move forward? I hope so.