By Leonard Pitts Jr.
Published: 02/28/10
[snipped]
... ultimately, people seem moved by something even bigger than race. This is race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, “culture,” and the fact that those who have always been on the right side, the “power-wielding” side, of one or more of those equations, now face the realization that their days of dominance are numbered.
There is a poignancy to their responsive fury because one senses that the nether side of it is a choking fear. We are witness to the birth cries of a new America, and for every one of us who embraces and celebrates that, who looks forward to the opportunity and inclusiveness it promises, there is another who grapples with a crippling sense of dislocation and loss, who wonders who and what he or she will be in the nation now being born.
One hopes they will find answers that satisfy them because the change they fear will not be turned back. No one ever volunteers to return to the rear of the bus.
So for all the frustration the tea party movement engenders among the rest of us, one also feels a certain pity for people like the woman last year who cried, plaintively, that she wanted her country back.
As if she didn’t realize that it is already, irrevocably, gone.
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