主题：【原创】Zero Tolerance & 16 Mins -- pxpxpx
In the past 72 hours, a female African-American mid-level US government official dramatically got back on her feet shortly after both her career and life had been derailed.
Shirley Sherrod, head of the United States Department of Agriculture's rural development office in Georgia, was forced to resign on Monday due to her once believed to be racist comments made in this March during a local banquet of NAACP.
According to the video clip posted on BigGovernment.com, while recalling her experience 24 years ago, Shirley said:
…
"He had to come to me for help. What he didn't know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him,"
…
"I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land -- so I didn't give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”
Not surprisingly, once her comments got aired by FOXNEWS on Monday, many people felt disappointed and angry. Consequently, on the very same day, Shirley was asked to pull over and submit resignation “by there and then” on her blackberry while she was still driving.
She was told that the decision was made by the big dog!
By the end of the Monday, all the involved parties took their stand by denouncing Shirley: White House, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, NAACP, Andrew Breitbart / Biggovernment.com, and, of course FOXNEWS, without exceptions. Shirley’s career was apparently facing grave danger and few would believe she’d even have a chance.
However, on the following day, the tides turned.
It turned out that Shirley’s comments had been taken out of the context.
She was actually telling a consciousness-raising story to explain how she got from “there” to “here”, i.e. working for change instead of staying biased. Full video posted by NAACP supported her. More convincingly, the white farmer in her story testified that “If we hadn’t have found her, we would have lost everything, I’m afraid”.
To the involved parties, the aftermath isn’t pretty though.
All of them reversed their stand and many issued apologies.
Although people can easily see many shadows behind this drama, e.g. tea party, biased public media, politics, liberals, conservatives, up-coming midterm voting, racism, bureaucracy, not to mention conspiracies, few would doubt the seriousness of this zero tolerance policy against racists, if convicted, within the US government.
As one of the red lines, at least in this case, it’s been fully tested.
Then, how about the 16-mins case in WuHan?
Can we expect to see some red line being fully tested as well?
I truly hope so.
Or, should we have to say:
I want to believe…, I have to believe…?
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🙂【原创】Zero Tolerance & 16 Mins
🙂del 2 新楼 字0 2010-07-22 09:25:04
🙂Many thanks pxpxpx 字0 2010-07-22 13:11:06