At issue recently is a statement by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (USMC) from several years ago in which he said:
"God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
My wife was kind enough this evening to point out to me that the second sentence in Rev. Wright's sermon is a direct paraphrase from the Old Testament when God warned the Israelites to not be so haughty as to think they were as powerful as God.
I then learned that in 1967 the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the same warning about America as Rev. Wright gave in 2003. Dr. King said:
Don't let anybody make you think God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with justice and it seems I can hear God saying to America "you are too arrogant, and if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God.
People today do not remember how Dr. King scared the living daylights out of the corporate and political power structure of his time. Myth plays tricks on the mind and often leaves us worse off than blind. Dr. King was a force of nature, a man so powerful in his intellect and so indomitable in his will and charisma that he scared the nails out of white peoples' shoe soles every time he spoke.
It is very important to remember how close Dr. King was in spirit and intellect and drive to this man:
Watching these two men, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, makes be Goddamn Proud to be an American. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. had no problem saying God Damn America !!! because they knew that's what America needed at the time they said it.
The same applies today.
Cheers. And thanks. And here's a bonus track from Bunny Wailer and myself helping to celebrate the rebirth of my river, the Kennebec River in central Maine, after being destroyed from 170 years by pollution and dams. .