Let’s Have A Beer. . .

It hasn’t happened yet.

But it sounds like it might.

You gotta hope it does.

It would be a beginning, and in a time of so many unpleasant endings, a hopeful beginning would be nice to see.

What we’re talking about is three guys having a beer, except one of the guys is President of the United States, another is a sergeant in the Cambridge, MA police department and the third is a Harvard professor.

For the benefit of those who’ve been on Mars the last several days:

So this late-50s black guy comes home from a trip and finds the front door stuck on the house he rents from Harvard where he’s a widely respected professor. He and the black guy who brought him from the airport force the door.

Someone sees a couple of black guys forcing the door and calls the cops.

Cops arrive and enter the house, asking the professor for explanations. Cops, a black-and-white team, are doing what they’re trained to do. Professor, outraged at being confronted in his own home, raises a fuss and winds up taking a stroll in handcuffs on a charge that’s later dropped.

Activists on both sides howl. Professor’s supporters say this is typical of what being a black man in America is about. Cops, a veteran salt-and-pepper duo, say they were just doing their job, which doesn’t include being loudly dissed. Things might have cooled but the President give a news conference on health care and gets asked a question about the mess. Says although he’s a friend of the professor and doesn’t have all the facts, that it sounds as if arresting the professor was stupid.

Stupid?

Oy, Vey – racial animosity and resentment hits the fan big time. Stupid indeed.

We now have three honorable and respected men dancing in the mud puddle and wondering why they’re getting so dirty: Barack Obama, President of the United States; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard professor; Sgt. James Crowley, an immensely respected Cambridge cop who teaches classes in avoiding racial profiling, no less.

Words bounce back and forth and the chattering classes circle like wolves around three wounded buffalo, and then President Obama, some say at the urging of his wife, but we’re not going there, says the equivalent of “You know, guys, I may have said more than I should have and before this gets completely away from us, let’s have a beer and talk about this. At the White House. On me.” He says it in calls to each of the other two guys and it looks like they might accept.

You gotta hope so.

It would set an example of three guys of different backgrounds getting into a disagreement over legitimately held points of view and instead of hammering each other saying “Screw it – let’s have a beer and talk about it.”

You know, like men.

Like grownups.

Like Americans, when we remember where we’re going is always more important than where we’ve been.

So God Bless Beer – it beats bombast every time.

And God Bless Wives who say “You said WHAT?” – but we’re not going there.

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