We Have a Dream

In case you were not aware, today, April 4^th, 2008, marks the 40^th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Television, radio, print and internet journalists, publishers and pundits poured forth with memorials, remembrances and lessons borne from their experiences with, or memories of King. Jesse Jackson, in a widely published opinion piece reminded us that there is more work to be done to bring justice to all the peoples of America. That Dr. King would have been satisfied to know that today’s America – a place where the adjusted-for-inflation median income of African Americans has doubled in the time since his death – has before it a Black man and a woman leading the competition for the highest office in the land.

He reminds us that America has become more like the Promised Land that Dr. King spoke of in his most famous speech.

Look at our leaders! See what this country has become!

Yet, we’re reminded that there’s more work to be done.

Jesse Jackson is right. There is more work to be done to bring justice to these shores. There is more work to be done to bring equality to this place. Work to be done, indeed.

But I believe that the time for leadership is over.

I will spare you a long list of failures. I won’t remind you of the imperfect humanity that lies beneath the skin of every man and woman who seeks to lead, because their weakness, their humanity, is the same weakness and humanity as yours and mine.

I believe that America has become inured to the sweet seductions of demagogues and demi-gods. We see the weaknesses in our leaders and we lose faith in them, and lose faith in their ability to lead us from darkness to light, and consequently, we lose faith in the system of leadership.

We retreat to our iPods and iPhones, youtube and Colbert. We seek solace from the harsh realities that loom over us like the dark shadows of a million rain clouds.

We live our lives as though there isn’t a war in Iraq, a war in Afghanistan, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Israel, Pakistan, India, China, Tibet, Colombia. We act as though $100 a barrel oil is just not all that. We think the credit crisis is some wealthy banker’s problem. We ignore the scaffold-toppling wind-storms in New York, deadly lightning in Arkansas, drought in Africa, cracking ice, filthy air, filthy water, poverty, and our neighbors with negative-savings suffering foreclosure.

I used to joke that as long as the malls were open and they took credit cards, nothing in this country would ever change.

I see a government falling over itself to ensure that nothing in this country will ever change. I see attempts to allay the consequences of reckless fiscal policy with even more heavy-handed and more reckless fiscal policy.

I see hard times ahead for everyone.

I live in Beacon, New York and have occasion to see Pete Seeger. On MLK day in 2008, I played bass with his loosely assembled band at an MLK memorial at the Springfield Baptist Church.

I listened to what he said about his time with Dr. King. I listened to other veterans of Selma and Montgomery speak about their experiences with Dr. King.

And now it occurs to me that the leadership our nation sorely needs is not going to be found in another MLK. Like waiting for the messiah, we embrace and discard so many worthy and unworthy men and women. We seize on a ray of hope, a hint of promise. A Black man for President. A woman for President. A grizzled war veteran for President.

But the time has passed for a new MLK, or JFK, or Reagan. There is no place today for a uniter thanks to the vast efficiency of the dividers.

We need leadership desperately, but now it must come from within. From within each one of us, from within our villages, towns and neighborhoods. We need one hundred million MLKs to stand up in school, to stand up in Church, to stand up in the town hall and say “I have a dream”. To promise to themselves first, then to their neighbors that they alone will work to make a difference. That they will live their lives for the betterment of mankind without wishing for recognition and honor, fame and wealth. That they will truly think globally and act locally. I know it’s been said a million times by a million bumper stickers, but today, more than at any other time in this nation’s recent history is it true: change comes from within.

Comments

[ren]

Welcome back.

I feel the same way.

Maybe there never even was a country here.

Just a dream of a country.

I know somehow, that nothing is possible.

I know all the teachings are rhetoric, penned by a goebbels of some kind.

If I could find a hidden valley to retreat to, I would go gladly.

But I'm stuck here instead, with all the misled people.

[B Tween]

Thanks, and welcome back to you too.
Ya know, we'd written about this at some point during the Hall campaign days: the difference between pure service to self and service to self with some society benefitting consequence.
You said something along the lines of Hall would be walking down a hall of the capital and some wiseguy would give a pssst, hey buddy, I got a great way for us to make a killing. I countered by adding "while saving 10,000 Namibian orphans".
Being misled is a consensual state, and there are no hidden valleys left. The best we can hope for is to be, essentially, left alone in our cubicles. Whether they're 500 or 3500 square feet.

We're all cops and criminals, and the most we can hope for is that some of us will do our best.

[ren]

I've been trying.

[Kathleen M]

Wish I'd gotten over here sooner. But this is better than well said: hear, hear!
And here's hoping the world listens.

[Ren]

I will always return to the salt lick from time to time. Now it's December 2008.

What was the subject?....Oh yeah....

Inequality

Is inequality a problem facing mankind? Or is it the root condition of mankind?

Do we need a Pete Seeger to shake us awake, or is Pete a privileged celebrity microphone-hog, a delusion-monger, keeping 1,000,000 new Pete Seegers from singing new tunes, about new kinds of beauty?

In school, as a child, I easily remembered all the lessons without particularly trying, while others struggled mightily just to get by. Was I to blame for remembering, or were they to blame for not remembering? Should I have purposely given wrong answers just to fit in? In "Equality" paradise, will the idiots be made smarter, or ought the standouts be harrassed into feigned stupidity? Mao's failed Cultural Revolution worked on just that principle, as did Pol Pot's Slaughter Fields. Make your own judgement.

Separate but equal, or conjoined but unequal? Conjoined but unequal is the stark reality.

When a hedge fund manager creates bogus "wealth" by securitizing a bet against the interest rates, is his sly non-productive gambit simply "more equal" than the simpleton's gambit of working a menial job, for steady pay? Can such plausibly deniable larceny possibly be defended in the face of an entire world culture, now sinking into regression? Or does it give everyone a wealth fable to falsely believe in for another month or two, providing the carrot on the stick? You decide.

In Star Trek parlance, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. What are the hallmarks of societies that benefit many, and yet restrain elitist excesses? Is it China's "Communism Above, Capitalism Below" hybrid? And what of "inequality" in the DRC?
I hear of construction workers sleeping on cardboard mats by the hundreds in the basements of the Shanghai buildings they are constructing, without food, sanitary facilities, or care of any kind, whose monthly wage will not buy a single bottle of Coca Cola in the building they have made, once it is finished. Surely unequal. And yet they travel hundreds, thousands of miles to be unequal in just that way (as do Central American sojourners to the USA). It's truly mind boggling. Traveling a thousand miles to be exploited. If it's so bad, why do it?

I think the flaw in Pete's thinking is his subconscious desire to propagate the Marxian error. Marx assumed equality was desirable, and attainable, and went on to analyze systemic schemes that denied or promoted his imagined "Ideal State", the "Equality Paradise". Without arguing Pete's politics, then or now, I just would like to point out that the "Equal State" is a fable, one created to recruit followers to Marx, and bereft of any use to the human race as a whole.

A dream.

An advertising scheme.

There will never ever be any equality.

Each relationship has a dominant and a submissive partner, and in being so politically unsymmetric, provides bliss-equality to both members. Realities are always mixed in this way. A seller always extorts more than intrinsic value out of each purchaser. All society members, except those who die defending the system in battle, have exploited the loss of the dead defenders, to be their gain, and then promptly forgotten about it, not wishing to be indebted, especially to people who no longer exist.

The single equality is historicity.

What?

The dead are all equal, completely, and forever.

So what of us, the unhappy living? Must we all be guilty of exploitation for eating vegetables picked by peons? In Pete's dream, yes. In Teilhard's dream, no. As per Teilhard, the peons, the vegetables, the earth, and us.....all who coexist today, are destined to be painted like an onion skin on top of all the evolutionary precursors who brought us to this point, and the onion itself then squeezed by mighty forces over eons into mind, or soul, if you will. When the totality of all architecture, all complexity , all history, becomes squeezed to to a Hiesenberg-scaled point object and awakens, we will have the answers.

Until then, charity is best done one-on-one, ala Mother Teresa.

Mass-marketed "Pop Charity" is just one more scam.

Don't you fall for it, Bren!

[brendog]

I'm glad you pop by once in a while to remind me that rationality can exist in the roiling cesspool.

When you read articles about the likes of Peter Kraus (Merrill for 3 months!) using his 25 million taxpayer funded bailot dollar "severance" to buy a palatial Park Ave. apartment, while an "orderly bankruptcy" is planned for the auto industry - for the sole purpose of breaking the union contracts and screwing UAW workers out of their modest, though maybe better than average, compensation packages, I wonder if this is really about inequality as much as we are seeing a change in the social consciousness' view of social inequity.

The Wall Street bailout was the most naked demonstration of the vast collection of government and central banks' bias toward the "haves" at the expense of the next 3 generations of "have nots" and "have a little"s.

Consider the two phases of Seeger-revolt and their manifestations. Early on, during the coal miner strikes and organizing periods, it was a battle of economics: labor vs management.
Later, during the "rights march songleader-Seeger period" is was a color war. Black demanding just compensation from the white institution.
Yet that was still a battle for green money.

There is no color in society, only gangs of thugs and their machinations for having more.

One of the few societal goods that I believe the Judeo-Christian tradition that dominates this country has given us is the notion of our collective obligation to Charity. I believe this is missing from almost every other major religious philosophy. There are no Buddhist or Hindu medical centers in Sheboygen, but there are Catholic, Methodist and Jewish ones.

Can a society rely on a one to one charity structure, or do you end up with sacred cows stepping over the corpses of TB victims in the steets of your cities?

And to extend that, a state founded on institutional (mandatory) bottom-up charity - whether it be called Socialism or Liberalism, may have to some extent a consequence of "equal misery for all", but, the grounded reality is that every society has its "haves", "have somes" and "have nots". The basic entreprenurial drive of all human societies will ensure that.

Government should act as referee, if only to ensure that a class of people is not given too great an opportunity to cheat by looting the public treasure and using that money to buy luxury digs with gorgeous views of Central Park.

Is today much different than it was back when the coal miners were striking?

Will the extremism of the derivatives concocting button pushers in the Wall St. banks beget a quiet backlash extremism?

I can see a time in the near future, as the total is added up and the bill is left on the table, where our new government seeks ways to recoup some of that money, and the "have nots", with digital torches and pitchforks, concoct ways to take some of that back.

The effects of the recent evaporation of wealth will not go unpunished, I feel sure.

But who knows? :)

Happy New Year!

[brendog]

On another subject, it occurred to me that, with the GOP in tatters and the Southern strategy all but dead, I should change the name of the blog.
Northern Aggression sorta seems irrelevant.
Am I being too much of an optimist?

[Renaissance Dresses]

Martin Luther King is was, is and will always be an inspiration not only to Americans but also with people who loves democracy all over the world