  Maya Angelou, at the Democratic convention last night, read as pure a piece of poetry as she ever spoke. Of course, it wasn't hers. She read a quote from Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper's daughter who challenged the Democratic Party at its 1964 convention to break down the color barrier.
The words came from a plain-spoken woman with a workaday prose that broke through clouds because it did without the verbal frumpery of Angelou's strained verse. "What do I think of my country? What is that which elevates my shoulders and stirs my blood when I hear the words, the United States of America? Do I praise my country enough? Do I laud my fellow citizens enough? What is there about my country which makes me hang my head and avert my eyes when I hear the words the United States of America?
What am I doing about it? Am I relating my disappointment to my leaders and to my fellow citizens, or am I like one, not involved, sitting high and looking low? " Why does it seem that the two halves of that statement have diverged into the two political camps of the modern political scene? 
