President Obama On Trayvon Martin: The Deepest Truth Of Parenting

When President Obama spoke in the Rose Garden this afternoon he took a complex and horrifying event -- one that will rightly lead to wrenching conversations about racism, and race relations and self-defense, and police bias -- and distilled it to its core.
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One of the deepest truths of parenting is that you never see the world the same way once you have children. Everything gets filtered through a stark, sharp lens -- a prism of the heart, or maybe the gut, beyond thinking into feeling, past the universal into the personal.

It could have been my child.

When President Obama spoke in the Rose Garden this afternoon he took a complex and horrifying event -- one that will rightly lead to wrenching conversations about racism, and race relations and self-defense, and police bias -- and distilled it to its core.

"If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," the President of The United States said. And at that moment there was nothing else to say.


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