So here's a brief commentary I wrote last week concerning the tribute to Rosa Parks. I sent it to NPR, but somehow I doubt they'd print/air it!

Last Monday, Rosa Parks was honored for her legendary role in the Civil Rights Movement with a memorial service at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church and a slew of news segments lauding Parks' seated stand while managing to say surprisingly little about the rest of her 92 year life. And I don't know how others felt as they watched these fawning bits, but the excessively sycophantic nature of these segments and overuse of the same key phrases rang so false to my ears that I was only "moved" to change the channel in disgust. I don't mean to underemphasize Parks' involvement or dedication to the movement, mind you, but a lot of other factors contributed to its success. Not only do I very much doubt that Parks the first person to be arrested for refusing to give up her seat, but her act would hardly have been so effective if Martin Luther King, Jr., hadn't called for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, nor would his merely calling for the boycott have made any waves whatsoever if not for the compliance of the manifold participants. Listening to the tributes to Parks, however, one would think that she single-handedly brought about the end of segregation and ushered America into a new age in which skin color is a moot point and everyone is treated as an individual -- an age which, by the way, is so far from our present that (if the present glorification of racial stereotypes and social ostracism facing persons who don't adhere to them serve as any indication), most people appear to have given up on it.

I also thought it was pretty ghoulish that people were traveling from all over to visit a corpse in the Capital on Halloween (to say nothing of hearing the terrible demon Oprah Winfrey speak), but maybe that's just me.