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blue bits. red rocks.
Thursday 2 September 2010

The 2008 presidential election was a near textbook example of how you can win an election, and still lose a key voting bloc, in this case white voters. The deck was horribly stacked against the GOP. It had a failed, flawed George W. Bush presidency. It was plagued by corruption and sex scandals. It was widely blamed for crashing the economy. It had an aged, politically disheveled, presidential candidate, and a laughingstock vice presidential candidate. It lugged the baggage of two unpopular wars. Yet, its presidential standard bearer, John McCain still got nearly sixty percent of the overall white vote. In each of the three major elections since 2008 — the GOP’s wins in the 2009 New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races and Republican Scott Brown’s stunning upset victory in the Massachusetts Senate contest — the GOP candidate ran far better among whites in their state than McCain did against Obama in 2008. Beck knows that history and the political mood of the majority of white voters well. He’s stoked it for months on his TV show and he stoked it again at the Lincoln Mall and mocked Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement along the way. He speaks for the white majority in America. Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Wednesday 1 September 2010
Saturday 28 August 2010

We” is Emmett Till, tied to a cotton gin fan in the murky waters of the Tallahatchie River. “We” is Rosa Parks telling the bus driver no. “We” is Diane Nash on a sleepless night waiting for missing Freedom Riders to check in. “We” is Charles Sherrod, husband of Shirley, gingerly testing desegregation compliance in an Albany, Ga., bus station. “We” is a sharecropper making his X on a form held by a white college student from the North. “We” is celebrities like Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando and Pernell Roberts of Bonanza, lending their names, their wealth and their labor to the cause of freedom. “We” is Medgar Evers, Michael Schwerner, Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, Cynthia Wesley, Andrew Goodman, Denise McNair, James Chaney, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson, shot, beaten and blown to death for that cause. “We” is Lyndon Johnson, building a legislative coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats to defeat intransigent Southern Democratic conservatives and enshrine that cause into law. And “we” is Martin Luther King, giving voice and moral clarity to the cause — and paying for it with his life. The we to which Glenn Beck belongs is the we that said no, the we that cried “socialism!” “communism!” “tyranny!” whenever black people and their allies cried freedom. The fatuous and dishonorable attempt to posit conservatives as the prime engine of civil rights depends for success on the ignorance of the American people. Leonard Pitts Jr.

Friday 27 August 2010
Wednesday 25 August 2010

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind … When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I’m not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love … If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. Martin Luther King

Monday 23 August 2010

Americans talk about race when somebody like Dr. Laura transgresses the boundaries, when Henry Luis Gates reacts harshly to a police officer in his kitchen or when the Jena 6 are charged with attempted murder. We choose up sides and say our piece. I’m not sure if anything positive is accomplished by these occasional shouting matches beyond a fleeting opportunity to blow off a little steam. Dr. Laura is free to say pretty much anything she wants to say. Nobody is talking about filing a lawsuit. The First Amendment remains in full force. But we have the right to be offended by offensive talk. We are free to say what we will, but we’ve got to live with the consequences. I can’t remember a period in my adult life when so many people felt the need to engage in crude and intolerant rants. Things were worse in the late 50s and early 60s when I was a kid. But back then we had folks like Martin Luther King talking about a Beloved Community marked by compassion, mutual respect and radical inclusion. Hardly anyone talks that way in our brave new twenty-first-century world. That needs to change. Dr. Laura’s racial meltdown

Thursday 12 August 2010

Our job as progressives is to never be satisfied, to always be impatient with the pace of change. Frederick Douglass, Alice Paul, Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King, Jr.- none of them were ever satisfied with the progress being made, and the Presidents they worked with were constantly aggravated at the pressure they received. But big changes got done when Presidents understood the importance of working effectively with them and the movements they represented. It is time for Obama (and his staff) to understand this and make the effort. Even when we are being irritating, even when you think we are being unfair, the White House needs to reach out their hand to progressives and work with us instead of venting about us to the media. FDR understood that and got re-elected by landslides with enthusiastic base support in the toughest of times. LBJ understood that in 1964, got re-elected in a landslide with progressives happily behind him, but then forgot it and let Vietnam break his party in the ‘68 election. Bill Clinton understood that, avoided a primary in tough political circumstances, and won re-election easily with a pumped up progressive community strongly behind him. I hope President Obama comes to understand that it is your base, including the professional left, that can sustain you in tough economic and political times, but that you need to reach out to them rather than complain about them. Mike Lux

Monday 9 August 2010
Friday 30 July 2010

The other difficulty we all know too well is the human tendency to insist that some are not worthy of respect, that dignity doesn’t apply to the poor, or to immigrants, or to women, or Muslims, or gay and lesbian people. Prophetic work is about challenging human systems that ignore or deny the innate dignity of all of God’s creation. That’s the aspect of prophetic work that’s dangerous, for those systems often respond with violence – the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, the disappearance of righteous gentiles who rescued Jews during the Second World War, or the expulsion of a Ugandan bishop because he asked the church to treat the gay and lesbian members of his society with dignity. Katharine Jefferts Schori

Friday 23 July 2010

At the end of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, he was in the midst of organizing a Poor People’s March on Washington. He had come to recognize that poor people of every race were suffering the same injustices and living economically marginal lives. It is time to begin again where King ended and refuse to let race divide us as we work for economic justice in the United States and in the world. Valerie Elverton Dixon

Monday 12 July 2010

…King’s words these days are treated with the kind of disingenuous but-of-course lip service usually reserved for the Bible or the Constitution. Martin Luther King Jr. is frequently cited as something like a talisman — as an invocation and a protective inoculation. King is invoked most often these days defensively, as a counter-balance to some statement or stance that would otherwise seem to contradict the great revival of civil rights that King the preacher and person and actual historical figure embodied. slacktivist

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Martin Luther King Jr.

Friday 11 June 2010

…in a pluralist society such as ours, bringing morality and religion into politics does carry certain risks. But these risks are unavoidable in democratic politics. Liberals in recent decades have made the mistake of ceding to religious conservatives a monopoly on some of the most potent sources of political argument. It hasn’t always been this way. Think back to the abolitionists, some of whom were evangelical Christians, who argued that slavery is a sin; or to Martin Luther King, who drew on religious arguments against segregation. While it’s true that some people use religion cynically, it’s also the case that, on many political issues, it’s not possible to be neutral on the underlying moral question. I think liberals should engage rather than avoid the moral and religious convictions that citizens bring to public life—whether the issue is abortion, same-sex marriage, poverty, health care, or the environment. Michael Sandel

Wednesday 9 June 2010

[Nonviolence] is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil. Martin Luther King Jr.

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