Wright Was Almost Right

Everyone understands that messages often get garbled in transmission. Teachers demonstrate it by whispering a message to a kid at the front of the class and then getting it back from the kid at the back of the class after it’s been whispered from desk to desk.

Then there’s the old saw about the message sent from the front lines: “Send reinforcements we’re going to advance!” It ended up as “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance!”

So now I understand what Reverend Wright got wrong when he told his flock in Chicago that the US government deliberately injected the black community with AIDS to decimate it.

He garbled the message. What they told him was that government AID is so toxic that it could be compared to an attempt to decimate blacks.

So you could say that Reverend Wright was almost right.

But through a simple error in transmission Reverend Wright is condemning another generation of blacks to a life of blighted dreams.

Maybe Sen. Barack Obama (N-IL) will set it all right.