Today, as we see one Republican Candidate after another pander themselves on this day into the a cloak of the ideals and courage of the man whose is to be honored this day.. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We should take a moment to actually listen to his words and remember that he was not always so revered, and instead was reviled when he stood up and described exactly what America should immediately end it's War of Choice overseas, acting as the minion of the rich and making the life of the poor - "A Living Hell".
Some relevant excepts:
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
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Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.
At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.
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As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
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I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
This is not a Sugar Plums and Lollipops critique of America. This is some hard, tough talk - and at the time Dr. King was lambasted for it.
Clearly despite the claims of people such as Newt Gingrich that the NAACP (who argued both the Plessy Case & Brown V Board of Education which reversed that decision) somehow need a lecture on the issue of a Work Ethics and Collecting Paychecks, or Michelle Bachmann who claimed that we should ignore all the Founding Fathers who actually owned slaves such as Jefferson & Washington but that we should instead focus on 7-year-old "Founding Father" John Quincy Adams because after he was President he was lead council defending a set of illegally imported Slaves on the Amistad case in 1841 - or Ron Paul who would repeal the Civil Rights Act as an encroachment on the "Business Owners Right" to treat his Customers like Crap or even Sarah Palin, yeah - that's right remember her? - that it is conservatism that reflects the true spirit of Dr. King as she wrote in her book "America By Heart" - it is not.
Many on the left also believe that the current call for a smaller federal government and a return to federalism—otherwise known as states' rights—is code for a return to white supremacy.
But is it racist to believe in the principles of the American founding? To revere the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights and to invoke the Tenth Amendment? To want leaders and national policies that respect the wisdom and humanity of these documents?
No, clearly it is not. But when you recognize that those "principles of American founding" also included the Fugitive Slave Clause, the 3/5ths Clause and other elements which very specifically excluded on the basis of race from the full protections of citizenry - leading ultimately to the Dred Scot Decision which found that NO BLACK PERSON, whether slave or free, even if born in the U.S., was even Recognized as a citizen under those "Founding Principles".
And although all of these clauses were struck down by the 14th Amendment in 1868 which promised the "the equal protection of the laws to all persons within jurisdiction of the states, that it was because of the bias of those States exerting their "rights" via tools such as the "Black Codes" as well as deeply bigoted, misguided decisions such as Plessy v Ferguson which established the doctrine of "Separate but Equal" - that almost 100 Years After it's Ratification there was no protective or enabling legislation, and Dr. King's struggle for the rights of the downtrodden and the poor became vitally necessary.
It was a because of the fetish for those flawed and compromised original "principles" that this was needed. It was a fear of the future, a fear of progress - that made the Original Freedom Riders protest necessary, leading to their brutal murder by the Terrorists who opposed actually implementing the 15th Amendment which granted Black men the right to vote - again - almost 100 years previously.
Even today we see attempts to racially diluted the 14th Amendment with calls to take away the birthright citizenship that Dred Scot made necessary. And it is Sarah Palin's Party and Conservatives that lead this charge, not Progressives.
She continued:
The answer is important, because it speaks to the kind of country we are, and the kind of country we were meant to be. Did our founding values produce the country of Reverend Jeremiah Wright's rants? [Yes, see the Tuskegee Experiment] A place where African Americans or any minority would be justified in saying, "God damn America," instead of "God Bless America"? [YES! As would the Japanese interned during WWII would be justified, and the Native Americans who survived the Trail of Tears would be justified} Or did our Founders enshrine a set of principles that gave birth to a just society, despite the obscenity of slavery? Did they, in fact, set the stage for the elimination of slavery? Does America really need, in the words of President Obama, a "fundamental transformation" in order to be a good and decent nation?
Besides the fact that Rev. Wright's actual point was that we should Trust in God, not in Governments - and that ultimately GOD FORGIVES - Yes, it does.
And truly, it's more accurate to say they enshrined slavery itself into our national fabric with the various clauses I mentioned before - but I would also say that they also gave us the potential to ultimately dismantle it. Painfully. In fits, stops and starts. This progress was not inevitable, it had to be fought for inch by inch. And that fight goes on.
Lincoln did not free the slaves. No, seriously - he didn't. The Emancipation Proclaimation is actually a Military Ultimatum to the South to end their rebellion by the end of that year or else as a punishment and a threat the President was invoking his Commander and Chief power in War to strip them of their property (the Slaves) and openly invite them to join the Union Army against the South. But if they surrendered or were not currently in rebellion - they could Keep Their Slaves.
Never learn that in school? Read it for yourself.
That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
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Now, therefore I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion...
And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.
And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service
There was no exhalation of the basic Right to be free here. None what so ever. This was an act of desperation by a President who was at that point losing the war. Those freed slaves were but pawns on his chess board.\
Lincoln was actually dead by the time the 13th Amendment was ratified (although he does deserve credit for getting it through Congress and signing it - although his signature is technically irrelevant) Yet even that Constitutional change didn't completely free and end slavery. Not absolutely.
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.[2]
Slavery was abolished, except for the Duly Convicted. And hence we see 150 years of Black Men being marched into our prisons. We see a rising movement to Privatize our Prisons paying inmates pennies on the dollar in order to Bust Unions, drive down wages and create greater profit centers for the Pirate Captains of American Vulture Capitalism.
As a Black Man in this country, I see the promise of American Freedom and Equality somewhat the way that Charlie Brown should look at Lucy with a Football in her hand. Time and time again that promise has been made, and time and time again - from even before this countries founding going back to the Virginia Slave Codes in 1705, that promise has been broken. Over and over again.
But still we keep kicking for that football. We still keep Hoping that this time the promise will be kept. We all, not just Black, but White, Brown, Asian, Male, Female, Straight, Gay, Transgendered, Liberal and even Conservatives continue to Hope for a Better America that doesn't just pay lip service to it's principles, but instead actually lives up to them.
Despite all the disappointments, despite all the frustrations, the lack of a public option in Health Reform, the continuance of DOMA, the continuance of GITMO and the War Maching State, the buying and selling of our Democracy to the Highest Bidder...
We may rail at the injustice, we may do so in strong and sometimes uncivil terms (GOD DAMN! America)... but we do so because we love this country, and we love the potential that it still has so grow and improve. Yes, even fundamentally transform.
That is IMHO what Dr. King believed in, and I think that this vision of America - warts and all - is what we should remember today and continue to strive to improve, even if it nearly breaks our hearts, breaks our spirits, hurts us and incarcerates us in the process.
Yes, indeed, Dr. King would Occupy!.
We still have Hope in the Promise. Thank You Dr. King, for reminding us.
Vyan