NO it is not the forth of July for all of us, no matter how much you would
ignore my words or drown me out with Sousa's band music. The burning truth is
that America has not lived up to it's creed for all its citizens, and does not plan
to.
Last Year in Philadelphia the city fathers opened to the public a new
Constitution Center. Lost in this dedication is the sad fact that this new
showcase of the Constitution was built on top of a grave yard of African slaves!
The irony of this is lost on no one who knows about it! Even now the insult
is added to by still another injury to the collective dignity of my people, and
fewer than 1 person in 10,000 in America is even aware of it. It's not the
sort of thing you talk about while engaging in a festival of
self-congratulations.
The True Forth of July will not dawn for my people nor for America as a whole
until the sins of racism and bigotry are washed away, apology and compensation
made to the descendants of American slave holding and Jim crow -- and not until the
nation as a whole, not just her government stays their hand from domestic and
global racism, acknowledges our plight. Until then there is nothing to celebrate as a nation,
nothing but
the swelling vanity of a short sighted and small minded people.
America can kill Malcolm X, assassinate Martin Luther King, send cops to murder
Fred Hampton in his bed, or shoot Robert F. Kennedy in a hallway, but
America can not kill their message, nor make us forget their example. These
men never fired a shot in anger but were silenced because they dared to try to
make America a place of equality. Instead of listening, America continues to be ruled
not by a true rule of law but by a wealthy elite who support George Bush and his
cronies in Texas and Saudi Arabia.
America is becoming a place where moral bankruptcy is a kind of religion,
where corruption at the highest levels IS the order of the day and the ignorant
mob is kept in a perpetual state of alarm over the threat of mostly
non-existent terrorist threats.In George Orwell's book 1984, the author speaks of a process where the wars a
nation fights are not meant to cease but to go on year in, year out, decade in,
and decade out for the sole purpose of maintaining the status quo.
George Bush calls
himself a war president. The real term is "war-time president," meaning a
President during a time of war. No President should be in office to wage war.
A President's primary goal should be to
wage civilization.
The point is that while war is furthered poverty grows,
while our court system become macabre finance companies for the States,
squeezing the poor and indigent of Moines in the form of parole fees and
court fees, justice goes wanting. True Justice is NOT justice at someone else's
expense.
Our nation locks up and locks down millions of people but the broader justice remains
elusive, a justice where those responsible for creating or perpetuating a condition in which crime and corruption flourishes
and remains unpunished. An awareness
of the Larger Injustices of our nation is what is needed now.
Still, there will be those who say America, love or leave it or go even
further as many have and say "go back to Africa" or where ever,
but those are the cries of small, frightened men clinging to their fears, afraid
that THEY may have to change in order for America to become America.
It is a necessary thing to criticize America for her short comings without
losing faith in her essential potential to go beyond being a nation of
hucksters, hustlers ,snake oil sales men, casual or institutional racists or
crime families committed to making their lives better at someone else's expense.
This thread of "take what you can-when you can-from whom you
can" runs through our entire history as Americans and explains much of our
conduct as a nation, from the wanton holding of slaves in the 18th and 19th
centuries, to the support of dictators for oil and strategic metals today.
2000 years ago there was an idea that was Rome, a place where men and
women fought and died for the idea that people could live together in peace and
equality. Rome's true self was lost to greed and corruption often masked by displays of
ceremony and grandeur to keep the population miss directed.
It is still
the same today in Washington where men speak words they have not written to
selected crowds in staged media events. They talk a kind of word-speak where
they use hot button terms to get people fired up to do their bidding on issues
which are used merely to disguise their intents to covet what the world
has in the name of democracy. Don't think for a moment that the elite care
about you because you are white, or a veteran; they don't need you, and you are expendable.
We in America claim to be the inheritors of that once great republican
idea that undergurded the foundations of Rome, the question now is: is that idea
worth working toward. I say that it is .
But the quest for the True Fourth of July in the True America must begin with
mutual respect for one another, for the truth and for our collective right to
live a better, more meaningful life, not just a life with more or bigger
possessions .
My original concerns still stand. What I believe is that America is intolerant
of the demand for full participation by minority groups in general and by
African Americans in particular. The deliberate removal from the voting roles
and subsequent labeling of persons in Florida as felons during the 2000
election, many of them African Americans is a prime example of my argument.
That there be a frank discussion of issues of fundamental, entrenched bigotries
so pervasive as to be invisible, so invisible as to be pervasive, be put on the
table and discussed not with rancor and fist shaking but with an epic
calm.
Because we are a nation of schemers, go-getters, rugged individualists and
hustlers we are often unable to work together as a nation until there is a
crisis and then we usually work against our own interests, we point
fingers at one another , blame someone else, blame the poor, the Italians, the
Germans or the Japanese as we did in the second world war.
In the south the
white man blamed the black man for his troubles after the Civil War, resulting
in 100 years of disenfranchisement, the economic and cultural equivalent of
placing a 100 pound mill stone around a man's neck and then expecting him to run
a foot race uphill. The happy inheritors of this legacy can be found today in
the mean-spirited, money-motivated politics of the ultra-right wing of the
Republican Party. Their hoods replaced with dark, blue suites.
As for reparations, the discussions of reparations cannot begin with questions of
money, the issue is not about money and it is an insult to suggest that it is.
The question of reparations is a multi-dimensional pursuit to become
who we can become as a nation. Within those dimensions is the question of
admitting of the facts, that these things did happen and their result is
still with us today.
Only then can the nation purge itself of guilt
for its crimes, disgorge itself of racism and begin the true healing process, a
process which will take many years if not decades to complete. The true
Fourth of July is then something which we living now should not hope to celebrate
but hope that our children shall, for when the day spoken of in this text does
dawn it will be the Fourth of July not just for America but for the world, no
matter what date it falls on......
One Year ago, on the Fourth of July 2003 I published this article on the
internet resulting in some debate on my comments about our values as a people,
on the meaning of the Fourth of July in the United States and it's deeper
meaning. Every year for the rest of my life this article shall be published anew
with additional commentary about the state of race relations and justice in the
United States. Until the United States scrubs itself clean of the stench
of Racism, Oppression and injustice in all of its contrived forms, this
discourse shall go on and on ...and on. |
