Musings of a (Fairly) Young Contrarian
Social issues, intl affairs, politics and soccer. Aimed at those who believe that how you think is more important than what you think.
This blog's author is a freelance writer and journalist, who is fluent in French and lives in upstate NY.
Essays are available for re-print, only with the explicit permision of the publisher. Contact
mofycbsj @ yahoo.com
Thursday, January 21, 2021
The pathogen is gone but the poison remains
Monday, January 18, 2021
Dr. King's full dream: dignity for all
“Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is doing nothing more or less in this area than collective bargaining; bargaining for human dignity, bargaining for decency. He is fighting to redeem the soul of America.” - Jackie Robinson
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize for his
advocacy against segregation and other forms of state-sponsored racism.
On this national holiday honoring him, it's worth remembering that King
viewed as more than mere legal racial equality.
He viewed the struggle
more broadly as one in favor of human dignity. This is why he did not
retire from public life following legalistic victories such as Brown vs
the Board of Education or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Although
legal segregation was crumbling in the last years of his life, Dr. King
did not diminish his activism in any way. He merely refocused it toward
another aspect of human dignity.
At the time of his assassination in 1968, King was in Memphis as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SLCC) Poor People's Campaign,
where the city's garbage workers were protesting against unlivable
wages. The SLCC had conceived the campaign as a way to mobilize poor
people of all skin colors on behalf of a federal economic plan to
rebuild American cities.
King realized that the end of state-imposed segregation would not
improve the lives of black people if they remained miserably poor. In
much the same way the lives of blacks in the south remained virtually
unchanged long after the 'transition' from slavery to sharecropping.
King viewed the campaign part as the second phase of the civil rights'
struggle. He viewed endemic poverty as a civil rights' issue.
This commitment to human dignity animated another lesser known aspect of
King's work: his opposition to the Vietnam War and to militarism more
broadly.
During his Beyond Vietnam speech
given exactly one year before his murder, he explained why opposition
to the aggression against Vietnam had entered into his activism:
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men
[in the ghettos of the north], 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. For the
sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of
hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
Americans were being shipped off to Vietnam to kill, to destroy and to
die. Nothing good was happening because of this. And King knew that the
war machine specifically sought those with few other economic options to
serve as its cannon fodder, a situation that's little different today.
Like many social justice advocates before and since, he deplored how
much of our national resources (both financial and human) was wasted on
fabricating foreign enemies to obliterate. "A nation that continues year
after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of
social uplift is approaching spiritual doom," he warned.
King probably realized that the fact that many young people had few
other economic options was no accident, but the result of conscious
policy choices made to ensure an insatiable monster created, funded and propped up by your tax dollars always had food.
(It's not the only insatiable monster but the other main one merits an entry of its own)
To restrict Dr. King's legacy to the fight for legal equality for black
people is to sell him short. And it's misleads people into believing
that his dream has been realized. His true struggle was the quest for
human dignity for all people.
He could be no clearer about this when he concluded his Beyond Vietnam speech:
We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims
of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human
hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
If you truly want to honor him, then follow this injunction.
Sunday, January 17, 2021
Stop blaming working class people for fascism
The core of Trumpism is not people working three jobs to barely make ends meet.
Cue the old objectivity vs neutrality debate in journalism - sometimes called "both sides-ism" - an abject failure in the face of unvarnished evil.
Saturday, January 16, 2021
A sliver of optimism in a dark time
Friday, January 15, 2021
American un-Exceptionalism
Friday, January 01, 2021
The achilles heal of liberal democracy
One of the bases of liberal democracy is that the way to change behavior is more public and civic education (not solely in the schooling sense). It's based on the premise that failure to make wise decisions is based on lack of information or lack of credible information and can be remedied simply by filling that void.
Tuesday, December 22, 2020
Broadband internet and rural economic development
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
The electoral college has always been controversial
Everything old is new again.