Friday, January 23, 2009

A Bill Moyers Essay (January 23rd, 2008)


For the past two years or so, I've done my best to catch episodes Bill Moyers Journal on PBS every Friday night. Thankfully, whenever I miss a show it's always available on his website anyways. This week's edition was particularly interesting because he brought along two pairs of experts in both economic and African American studies to discuss the impact of Barack Obama's inauguration, as well as the challenges we will be facing in the future. The clip posted above, however, was Mr. Moyers' weekly essay to cap off his show. This week, Moyers touched on the alarming fact that 1 out of every 100 Americans is currently sitting in a prison cell. He goes on to discuss the massive discrepancies of our educational system and the machine that robs the nation's youth -- mostly from the inner-city -- of the potential to learn, mature and grow. Moyers picks out an exceptional passage from Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father (1995), to highlight the poverty of the South Side of Chicago as an emblem for all that is wrong in our country.

George Orwell once said that "in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act". One of the finest journalists our country has got, Bill Moyers is a true revolutionary.