SF Bay Area ministers call for African-American churches to stand with Occupy Wall Street: Occupy the Dream This movement was launched today by African-American faith leaders across the country, with the support of Russell Simmons and Benjamin Chavis. Nationally Occupy the Dream is calling for a moratorium on foreclosures, additional funding to replace cuts made to the Pell Grant program, and for major financial institutions to set up a $100 billion fund for job creation and training. They are also calling for individuals to move at least some of their money to credit unions or minority-owned banks in February, to be followed up if needed (can we doubt it will be?) by calling on larger African-American institutions and prominent individuals to move much larger sums.
I was raised Buddhist-atheist, but I like the way Rev. Mayberry talks. Mitt, he's looking at you here:
"I ain't got no problem with people becoming millionaires - I wouldn't mind joining the club myself," Mayberry told his congregation. "My problem is when you are so insensitive to people who have not been able to raise themselves up to the level where you are - and you snuff out their dreams."
We must honor King because there wasn't a day in his life after 1955 when he didn't risk being cut down in cold blood and still stood steadfast...King alone among contemporary heroes is worthy of a national holy day not because he mixed faith and politics, nor because he enunciated a sentimental dream. It was because he represented something truly terrifying...What looks today obviously like transcendent justice looked to conservatives then like anarchy. The conservative response to King--to demonize him in the '60s and to domesticate him today--has always been essentially the same: It has been about coping with the fear that seekers of justice may overturn what we see as the natural order and still be lionized. But if we manage to forget that, sometimes, doing things that terrify people is the only recourse to injustice, there is no point in having a Martin Luther King Day at all.
Rick Perlstein on MLK
As kossack 4CasandChio observes, Over 50 years ago Dr. King went to occupy Memphis
Rev. Mayberry urged his congregation to remember Rosa Parks:
"She said, 'My feets is tired, but my soul is rested,' " Mayberry told his congregation to shouts of "Amen!" "The original Occupy the Dream movement began right there. In a movement, there is no place for wimps."
Dr. King's 1967 speech on Vietnam War Read the whole thing, you'll be glad you did. Here is a true mensch. I hope I may be excused for not adding much except boldface, as Dr. King said it all here.
Here are some key quotes:
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.
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.
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.
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man.
It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
Dr. King may be gone (like another great Teacher) but his words and his dreams are still here for us.
P.S. I won't be around much, as I have to make dinner and go to dance practice tonight.