Ive posted this on King Day the last few years; to me it represents a lost opportunity--perhaps I should say a rejected opportunity. A few days ago I commented on our deliberate turn away from the possibility of creating a just, peaceful, plentiful world. Kings speech here, in which he outlines his decision to resist not simply Jim Crow segregation but to the violent five hundred year history of economic and political empire building that it was part of. The logic of institutional racism is the logic of invasion; both simply seek to control the human population in order to control resources and the wealth and comfort they generate. It seems fairly clear to me that the statements King makes here--the deconstruction of the myth of the United States as a force for freedom and justice--are precisely why he got his head blown off. It also seems clear that the choices that were made in 1967 through 1970--to reject the promise of justice and humanity that the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements presented us--was the beginning of the end of the United States as a place where justice and freedom might actually be realized some day. Nixon, Reagan, Kissinger, Cheney, the Bushes, a complacent and complicit Democratic Party, the financial and military industries they all seem to represent exclusively, and a cowed, self-absorbed, and propagandized American population, have built a world quite the opposite of the one King suggested was possible. https://youtube/watch?v=OC1Ru2p8OfU
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 23:59:53 +0000