Exactly as I enter this post I then find my self reading pages 66-67 in Phil Berrigan's must read, "Fighting the Lamb's War." Phil writes:
"What might Reverend King say if he could visit our country’s death cages, crowded with African-Americans waiting to die? If he could walk our inner-city streets again and see the legacy of crack cocaine, the. gangs, and hopeless poverty? I imagine him weeping, his tears drowned out by sirens and the sound of automatic gunfire, his message of love and reconciliation smothered by fascist ideologues.
Black mayors. Black Congressmen. Black police chiefs. Black generals. Black rock stars. Black film stars. Black sports stars. Some commentators argue that the glass is half empty, others that it is half full. The analogy hardly matters. We lurch toward the year 2000, dragging our bloody chains, our crimes, behind us. Millions of African-Americans are still living in poverty, captive to the “tricks” of institutional racism, police bmtality, white fear, and capitalist manipulation."
"Malcolm X intended to present his case before the United Nations. He was determined to tell the world that the United States govern ment was systematically violating the human rights of its own black citizens. Would the white community believe him, then or now? When the police fracture a welfare mother’s skull, or kill her son in the hallway of a housing project, the crime hardly makes the news. When the bullet-riddled body of another black teenager is taken to the morgue, the event is of no importance. What we don’t see, we don’t believe. What we don’t know, doesn’t happen. The mirror we looked into in the fifties has become the vicious magic show of the nineties:
- Ending affirmative action means creating meritocracy.
- Cutting people off welfare means giving people hope.
- Putting people to death means respecting life.
- Building atomic submarines, instead of schools, means protecting democracy.
- Destroying our children means saving them."
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