Speak Up, General: The Floor Is Yours : Speeches on duty and service will mean little if Powell fails to take a stand on our racial divide.

I don’t care if Colin Powell runs for President. I don’t care whether he’s a Republican or a Democrat. I don’t care if the Christian Coalition or the NAACP supports him. Because right now in post-O.J. America we need him for something even more important.

Today, we are at a flash point in the history of American race relations, where we look at our world around us not only from two different vantage points, but from such radically different perspectives, from such polarizing and opposite sets of life experiences, that we can no longer even talk to each other rationally. Post-O.J. America is a place where race pervades, and undermines, all serious discussion of public and social policy, and worse, where the debate increasingly breaks down along stark racial lines with less and less hope for reconciliation.

One of the hard lessons Los Angeles learned in the aftermath of the 1992 riots was that none of our leaders could speak to both sides of the divide. George Bush and Bill Clinton tried. So did Tom Bradley and Pete Wilson, Peter Ueberroth and Danny Bakewell. They came quoting Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall, and left promising to rebuild the core of a burned city. The promises have been kept, but the divisions have grown deeper. And so ultimately, each of them failed.

But now a leader exists who can bridge that divide. To both Americas, to both whites and blacks in post-O.J. America, Colin Powell is a symbol, not of the way things are, but of the way they can be.

Over the last several months, as Powell has flirted with the presidency, he continually returns to the themes of duty and service to his country. He points to his military service with pride, and has repeatedly suggested that such devotion to his country would be the motivating force behind any decision to seek the White House.

And now, at this all-important crossroads in our country’s turbulent history of race relations, there exists an unprecedented opportunity for precisely the kind of service to our nation and our society for which Powell so clearly yearns.

On Monday, upward of a million black men marched on Washington. And what are the faces that both white and black America saw? We saw the faces of Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson, and we saw very different things in those faces and heard very different things in their words. The chasm that separates the races will grow larger, unless someone--a leader with the stature, the reach and the personal history to talk to both Americas--steps forward. And no one person in either America is better equipped to do so than Colin Powell.

But what is Powell saying? Sadly, the one man who can address this growing chasm with authority, the one American who can speak, will not.

Powell’s reaction to the Simpson verdict was better suited to ostriches than humans. “I don’t know that we should go into a huge national debate on this,” he said. “We’ve got to move on.”

His reaction to the “Million Man March” has been a study in risk-aversion. He is not attending the march, but he explains his absence not on principle, but on scheduling conflicts. And he carefully walks both sides of the divide, gingerly embracing the march’s ideals while distancing himself from its organizers.

Americans don’t want a “huge national debate.” What we do want is discussion. We want a dialogue. Clinton, who lacks the moral authority with either America to lead that dialogue, at least made the effort to do so in his speech Monday.

So do something, general; say something. Whether it’s as a candidate or a private citizen isn’t important. But if you want to make a difference in post-O.J. America, you’ve got to be willing to set aside the caution that has marked your career to this point. You’ve got to be willing to take a stand.

Because if you don’t, if you stay silent, while this debate takes place over and around you, all the speeches you’ve given about the principles of duty and service will be rendered absolutely meaningless. And for all your talk over the past months about every citizen’s obligation to his country, you will have walked away from your own.

Both your countries, general, need a leader. That leader doesn’t have to be President, just someone willing to stand up for what he believes in.