Freedom Rider

It is sadly appropriate, given the violent nature of this country, that one of the avatars of peaceful demonstration, John Lewis, would experience so much abuse and threats to his life in his protests for racial equality.  Lewis, who died of pancreatic cancer at 80 this past Friday, was one of several black Americans who fought and marched for civil rights, and he was part of the generation that received its tutelage at the hands of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Lewis (above) helped form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960 (he would chair it for three years beginning in 1963) while in college and helped organize meetings to plot and strategize demonstrations against segregation in the South at at time when doing that was literally asking for trouble.  His first brush with death came in 1961 in his native Alabama when he and other students. black and white, tried to ride an intercity bus while violating the rules that demanded that blacks and whites ride separately.  He was hit in the head with a wooden crate at the Montgomery bus station.  Lewis persevered, joining Dr. King's inner circle and marching for voting rights toward the now famous Edmund Pettus Bridge on the way to Selma, where Lewis and others were viciously attacked.  They were able to completed the march soon thereafter when Americans appalled at the violence showed up in Alabama to support the demonstrators.   

After working with various groups in support of voting rights, Lewis settled in Atlanta and entered politics and was elected to the Atlanta City Council in 1980, going on to gain a seat in the House of Representatives in  1986, representing Georgia's Fifth House district - which mixes white and black suburbia with much of black-majority Atlanta .  He held his House seat for the rest of his life, taking principled stands for equality and government help for the forgotten members of society.  He remained true to his non-violent values, such as when he led other House members a sit-in in 2016 on the House floor to demand action on gun control.  All the while, he preached love - love your enemies as well as allies and prevent hatred, envy and jealousy from corrupting the soul of America while we strive toward a more perfect Union.  Other activists may have given up on that novel idea, but Lewis remained true to it to the end, and we are all better for it.  RIP.  

One More In the Name of Love

It really amazes me that fifty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Americans are coming more apart than together and are drawn even more to people who divide us and set us against each other for selfish reasons and destructive agendas.  American civilization has not only become more divisive, it has become coarser, more violent and less free.  Poor people of all races and colors are constantly diminished and shamed, we have a President who seeks to maximize his power to the point of being authoritarian, and for every Trump voter who wants to return to an America that never was, there's a smug leftie who wants to celebrate differences without adhering to common standards - like civic duty and a shared purpose.  And when we're not denigrating each other's dignity, we're bombing people in other countries that stand in the way of American hegemony, just as we did in Vietnam . . . and Grenada . . . and Iraq . . ..

I really can't say anything that hasn't already been said about how far we have not come since the assassination of Dr. King, who was the apostle of non-violence, brotherhood, equality, and the rule of law, but Dr. King's last speech ever, delivered in Memphis fifty years ago today, pretty much sums up how daunting the long, hard climb to a better world was then . . . and is now.

This video is a edit of two excerpts from that speech, referring to plans to fight an injunction against striking sanitation workers in Memphis, whom Dr. King was there to help, to deny them there right to protest.  I tear up every time I hear this . . ..  

The Depth Of Our Idiocy

I have a dream that when one of our greatest historical figures speaks out for what is important and pertinent in our lives, his quote will not be mangled by abridging it, which is what happened with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. on a wall at his memorial in Washington. King said, two months to the day before his assassination, "If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter." On the wall of the national Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, only part of the quote was used: "I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness." It makes Dr. King sound like an arrogant braggart. That is, it makes him sound like a Republican.

I have a dream that, if engineers can't find a stone tablet strong enough to include the entire quote, they'll find a similarly suitable one that can be placed on stone tablet in thirty days, as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has ordered the National Park Service to do. I have a dream that, when we honor someone else with a national memorial, the advisory board will be smart enough to exclude quotes too big for stone tablets and not place on such tablets truncated versions of said quotes taken out of context. Correcting a technical error after the fact is not how you erect a memorial. It's how you blog. :-p

I also have a dream that statues for future national memorials will not, as this one was, be carved in China. Ye gods, now we're outsourcing statues to the Chinese?

I have a dream that one day we'll be able to stand by an expertly crafted piece of public art, and join in the old American battle cry, "Made In the USA!"

I Have a Nightmare

Noted schizophrenic egocentric paranoiac prima donna Glenn Beck has parlayed his success at Fox News into a lucrative reality TV special, which is what his "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial this coming Saturday actually is. The rally, Beck explains, is meant to bring honor and dignity back to the civil rights movement and "reclaim" Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream. What? Reclaim it from what? From whom? And when did the civil rights movement ever lose its honor? When King spoke out against the war in Vietnam? When George McGovern was nominated for President? When Al Sharpton appointed himself as a family advisor to too many victims of racism at one time and couldn't manage his overloaded schedule?

Beck's interpretation of civil rights is a scary libertarianism in which people live for and care about themselves rather than for each other. Now, if I were asked to define civil rights, I couldn't recite the Webster's definition verbatim, but I know that grievances on Beck's agenda are not part of civil rights. Civil rights are essentially the rights to be a part of the community; the selfish individualism Beck espouses has nothing to do with that.

Guns, incidentally, are a part of Beck's agenda. Beck apparently plans to make Second Amendment rights a focal point of his rally, a point of fact underscored by the appearance of Sarah Palin and her known use of firearms metaphors. What do you expect from the woman who brought you aerial animal shooting? And by the way, isn't it in bad taste to talk about guns when talking about "reclaiming" the dream of a man who was shot to death?

Beck and Palin were both four years old (they were born a day apart in February 1964 - coincidence or supernatural phenomenon?) when Dr. King was assassinated, so they have no direct memory of the civil rights movement in its salad days. Which would be fine if they hadn't fallen asleep in high school history class back in the eighties when they were being taught about it.

If there's any good news about Beck's rally (and I'm stretching it here), it's that most residents of Washington, D.C., the majority of whom are black, won't be affected by it because organizers have distributed a map of the District showing in red the part where it's considered "unsafe" for these macho suburban white guys to travel through (i.e., most of it). Still, what's left (shown in blue) is the most recognizable and more tourist-friendly area of the District, and Beck is guaranteed a good deal of TV coverage by TV news outlets other than his own Fox News. Meanwhile, Al Sharpton is holding a counter-rally at a Washington high school at which Ed Schultz will appear. A high school? Bad PR mistake. I'm sure a lot of Americans, even in this age of ignorance, can still find the Lincoln Memorial on a Washington, D.C. map. But how many of them can find Dunbar High School?

Beck's rally at the Lincoln Memorial, by the way, is taking place forty-seven years to the day after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech on the same spot at the civil rights march on Washington. Because August 28 is a Saturday this year, Beck can count on a large gathering for his own rally. But would he be getting many participants, or so much attention from the media, if he were still holding the rally on the civil rights march anniversary and August 28 fell on a Wednesday this year, as it did when the march on Washington took place in 1963? Doubtful. Beck's fans wouldn't take a Wednesday off to attend a rally when they have jobs to hold onto in a recession.

And we all know what Beck and his fans think of the long-term unemployed.