Where should we be right now?
Scott Gilmore looks at David Letterman’s do-over moment and asks: Will I eventually realize there were important fights I should have joined, but didn’t?
"Letterman is clearly asking that question now. As part of his first show he took his cameras down to Selma and he went back to that bridge, and he walked across it with Congressman John Lewis, who was one of the leaders of the 1965 march. They talked about that day, about the importance of the civil rights movement, and about the issues of race that still linger.
It would be easy for me to cynically dismiss that as a maudlin attempt by an aging comedian to assuage some white guilt. But there is no doubt hundreds of thousands of Letterman fans who had come for the jokes were introduced to this painful moment in American history instead. And there is no doubt that many of those viewers will now look at our current moment in history differently as a result. If it is not too late for him, perhaps it is not too late for the rest of us to have our own ‘do over’ by simply stopping and asking ourselves that same question “Where should I be right now?”
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