Why does America suddenly have to be READY for things all the time?

[baby_mouse]

I don't understand this thinking. Perhaps some folk here could explain it to me?

If I had waited to be ready to take on my current job I would never have taken it. We learn by doing, no?

Political sea changes are a little more complex, sure, but you know what, no-one's EVER ready for them! They just happen! So I don't get this idea that you have to wait for other people to get ready for the next step before YOU put your energy behind it. I'm not entirely sure that that *is* the subtext of all these "Is America ready for candidate with, gasp, " but it certainly looks like it could be.

F'r'eavens'SAKE America! You are AMERICA! This Brit is here to tell you that you are demonstrably a nation of invention, change, development, moving forwards, making things better. If the Wright brothers had sat humming and hawing wondering "Is America READY for powered flight" you'd have got nowhere!

So why not SOCIAL change? I think you guys are missing a serious point about yourselves, great sea changes wash over your nation regularly. Why not GUIDE them, and I don't mean just via the lumpy, awkward democratic process. If anyone on this planet can pull off the sort of radical leap forward necessary to take your country out of its current mess... IT. IS. YOU.

Nobody was ready for Martin Luther King. He didn't care! HE WAS AMERICAN!

[hobbit709]

1. It's the Spongebob outlook

"I'M READY, I'M READY!!!!

[baby_mouse]

3. It's weird!

It's like America's being led to a curtain covering its eyes to have the curtain drawn away and go "EEEK EEEEK! BLACK PERSON!", lift its skirts and haring off, then coming back all like "Okay, okay, deeeeeeeep breath.... okay, PULL BACK THAT CURTAIN.... EEEK! BLACK PERSON!" and haring off again. Look, America. A nice curtain. "NO. I'm not ready."

Women and Black people have been in America for SOME TIME now...

[OneGrassRoot]

2. I get what you're saying,and I agree. Thanks for the wise words! n/t

[ChazII]

4. Good points.

Waitng for the gov't can be a disaster. The individual can handle some things without big brother.

[Kermitt Gribble]

5. It's all because of the right wing in this country.

The 23-25 percenters. You'll notice, any issue, whether it's voting for a black or woman candidate, national health care, Kyoto, and the list goes on - issues more mature, civilized countries don't even consider an issue, are all halted here by the radical right.

[baby_mouse]

12. But there's only 25% freaking percent of them!!!!

Sorry, I'm ranting, I know, but this is silly politics. I don't see the point waiting for fools to become wise...

[Deja Q]

6. So Hillary implied America isn't ready for a black president?

Ruh-roh...

[Fredda Weinberg]

7. Life is different for me. In NYC, our firefighters train all the time

to be ready for the real thing. NYPD starts with teenagers in their Explorers program to feed a force that's always numbered in the thousands. It's how we keep going in modern times.

9/11 was the second hit @ WTC, remember, but the coordinated attacks leaves even our system vulnerable. So when you hear talk of preparedness, it' here.

I've worked @ city offices, including the fire department. These people take their responsibly seriously, to the point of knowing their lives would be surrendered for mine. My city couldn't exist w/o them.

This is my America, which I've seen improve over the past half century. I appreciate progress and the institutions that make civilized life possible. However noble your ideals, reality is based on the best collective learning generations contribute.

You invoke the name of MLK w/o remembering he was already Martin Luther King Jr ... the son of a preacher who made him look meek. Please study more about the history of the family before making that mistake again.

[baby_mouse]

9. "Please study more about the history of the family before making that mistake again."

What IS this?

[Fredda Weinberg]

11. Out of Egypt

King's father always presented a more imposing figure, in a way, than his eldest son ever would. A strapping, boomingly assertive man, commandingly erect and chesty, Martin Luther King, Sr.-later to be known as "Daddy King"-was the bluffly autocratic preacher at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, who liked to advertise how, at one congregational meeting, he had quelled an obstreperous member by threatening to collapse a chair over his head. Raised a sharecropper's son in south Georgia, called then Mike, he was burly enough at fourteen to grapple his drunken father away from beating his mother. After the ferocious fight that ensued, his mother, fearing that Mike or his father would sooner or later kill the other, made her son flee to Atlanta. Mike King arrived in the alien clamors of that city, as he later allowed, "smelling like a mule," but full of a barging industriousness: belatedly plowing his way through high school classes, he was preaching at two country churches by the time he was twenty.

http://www.enotalone.com/article/6622.html

[Droopy]

8. The "Is America ready?" meme

is a tactic used to delay progress- to put trepidation in those who would be the agents of change.

[MedleyMisty]

10. Anybody remember being told "now is not the time"

after 9/11?

It's the clarion call of people who aren't outright neocon evil and have some conscience, but not enough to break through their prejudices and conditioning. Back in the day I'm sure they would have been among the kinder gentler benevolent slave masters, but would have said that "now is not the time" for emancipation. We're just not "ready" for it, you know.