Filed under: News, Politics, President Obama, Race and Civil Rights
There comes times in all of our lives when we are wronged. Then we have to decide whether to forgive or not.
Shirley Sherrod had to make that decision recently in the aftermath of being unfairly ousted from her gig at the Agriculture Department in a silly racial flap.
Hat-in-hand and extending an olive branch, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack asked for Sherrod's forgiveness and asked her to return to a job in his department.
But Sherrod turned him down.
And from this outsider's view, that was a mistake. Yes, Sherrod was victimized by Vilsack's knee-jerk reaction to a video that appeared to show Sherrod as a government employee who used race to decide whether she would or wouldn't provide services for a private citizen in need.
But its not like she was left twisting in the wind for years, months, weeks or even days when Vilsack discovered he had been duped by some dishonest editing of video by right-wing agitator Andrew Breitbart.
One day after the firing, Vilsack was backpedaling as news of the shady video editing job leaked out.
Sherrod is entitled to harboring some bruised feelings, but what else does she expect? She came out the hero in this story, while Breitbart has been unmasked as a dishonest fool. We all know she's no racist. She won.
If she were honest with herself, she would understand why she had to be let go after watching the edited tape.
With the Obama Administration's understandable hypersensitivity to all things racial, any official caught on tape talking about how they denied services to a citizen based on race would have to go.
But they corrected the mistake the next day as soon as they found out they were tricked.
Maybe Sherrod, who has not ruled out working with the Agriculture Department on a consulting basis, has visions of lucrative speaking engagements in her head. I wish her luck.
But it seems to me that she could have made a greater impact on the country by taking the agriculture job and using it as her bully pulpit for racial equity.