Monday, January 18, 2010
Learn to rise together
or fall one by one.
Every year on Dr. King's birthday I lament the mainstream appropriation of his image & causes. We (white people) want him to stop preaching the tough love at us.
I've said it again & again: The most dangerous thing you can do in America is try to form a political coalition of the economic underclasses. Which is what Dr. King was up to when he was murdered. All those years exposing himself in the deep South, & he gets killed in Memphis while supporting a labor union. It could have happened anywhere in 1968.
Racism is The American Ruse. The poor white could not be permitted to make a peaceful alliance with the poor black for mutual advancement. Blacks had to be at least a little poorer, & oppressed by law rather than the cultural conventions that kept "white trash" down.
Dr. King saw that Vietnam & the military draft were the tragic levelers; America's underclass young men, white, black, brown, all the colors, thrown together to blast a little nation on the other side of the world on behalf of ... who? what? The Army was the most integrated institution in America, an experiment in integration. The draft actually functioned to keep young male labor out of the job market after high school - the only logical reason for having a peacetime draft until a war could be found to justify it. Now we fill the enlisted ranks through financial incentives: learn a trade, pay for college, support your children, get out of the 'hood & drive a Humvee.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Every year on Dr. King's birthday I lament the mainstream appropriation of his image & causes. We (white people) want him to stop preaching the tough love at us.
I've said it again & again: The most dangerous thing you can do in America is try to form a political coalition of the economic underclasses. Which is what Dr. King was up to when he was murdered. All those years exposing himself in the deep South, & he gets killed in Memphis while supporting a labor union. It could have happened anywhere in 1968.
Racism is The American Ruse. The poor white could not be permitted to make a peaceful alliance with the poor black for mutual advancement. Blacks had to be at least a little poorer, & oppressed by law rather than the cultural conventions that kept "white trash" down.
Dr. King saw that Vietnam & the military draft were the tragic levelers; America's underclass young men, white, black, brown, all the colors, thrown together to blast a little nation on the other side of the world on behalf of ... who? what? The Army was the most integrated institution in America, an experiment in integration. The draft actually functioned to keep young male labor out of the job market after high school - the only logical reason for having a peacetime draft until a war could be found to justify it. Now we fill the enlisted ranks through financial incentives: learn a trade, pay for college, support your children, get out of the 'hood & drive a Humvee.
Labels: bully pulpit, holidays
