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an expanded and revised "el salvador option"...,
2005-01-17 12:32:51
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Ken points out that Kevin Cars...,
2005-01-18 14:35:07
mlk day:
suggested reading, timely and efficacious:
There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection
between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been
waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that
struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor --
both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were
experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I
watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle
political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America
would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of
its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and
skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was
increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to
attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became
clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of
the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their
husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative
to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had
been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to
guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in
southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with
the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they
kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them
together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity
burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never
live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of
such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows
out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three
years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the
desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov
cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer
them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social
change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked
-- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation
wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring
about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I
could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in
the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor
of violence in the world today -- my own government.
Also for those in the South: Happy Robert E. Lee Day
:: posted by buermann @ 2005-01-17 13:38:24 CST |
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