Search results for "Follow the money"

Follow The Money To Ferguson

Light Brigading August 14, 2014 Flickr/creative commons

Light Brigading
August 14, 2014
Flickr/creative commons

No doubt I will have more to say about the events still unfolding in Ferguson, Missouri, because the underlying factors are key issues for VenusPlusX.

For now, we’re are pointing you to Mass Incarceration: Follow The Money (Part 1 and Part 2), a 2012 analysis and op-ed we produced following the publication of Michelle Alexander’s scholarly and myth-shattering book, The New Jim Crow, well worth a full read and understanding for anyone committed to systemic change in this country. It answers the question, “Why?”

Institutionalized racism, money, greed, and special interests are what makes brown and black young men primary targets and victims, and it is being financed by your hard-earned tax-dollars.

Alexander points out the undeniably connection between the action-reaction cycle: the end of slavery delivering Jim Crow laws, the voting and civil rights acts of the 60s giving rise to the political Southern Strategy meant to rile southern whites to support radical conservatives, and the election of our first black president leading to the Jim Crow 2.0 and mass incarceration of brown and black young men we have today.

This is not just about another black teenager being gunned down by a white policeman because this is a regular occurrence in America, nor is it the completely bungled response by the police and political leaders who continue to fail this heart-broken and understandably convulsing community, or the deployment of militarized SWAT.

The legacy of Michael Brown, the Ferguson teen shot this week, will be the commencement at last of a serious examination of the underlying issues that created the atmosphere for it to have happened in the first place. It is a significant turning point in our shared history because people all over the country are finally standing up to be heard, embracing their power they too often surrender.

More to come . . .

 

 

 

in Events / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information  by 16 Aug 2014 0 comments

Mass Incarceration: Follow The Money (Part 2)

America’s unconstitutional militarization of local and state law enforcement,
based on racial hatred and racial politics, and the training, munitions,
and  financial incentives that support it, has created a new Police State.

Slavery ended, and reactionary Jim Crow laws replaced it, and now Mass Incarceration, called The New Jim Crow by scholars, is imprisoning people of color for minor offenses at a savage rate in reaction to the strides made through civil rights and voting rights legislation passed 50 years ago.

The U.S. Constitution bars the government from any militarization of local and state law enforcement (with few exceptions) for good reasons, but that all ended with the so-called War on Drugs (1971). This methodical (and nefarious) tactic of stripping disproportionately brown and black felons’ constitutional rights has succeeded and is succeeding today because it is imbedded in the Republican party, started by President Nixon with his racist  “Southern Strategy,” and codified by President Reagan’s War on Drugs.

This war  has utterly failed: prices have decreased while drug usage has increased, the exact opposite of its public mission. But the War on Drugs goes on and on in spite of its failure because it is filling the greater political imperative of disenfranchising as many people of color as the government possibly can. President Nixon designed the racist Southern Strategy specifically to exploit racial hatred and fear for political gain. It has worked masterfully to cement power for a select group of white people who are draining any hope of a free society that can live up to its own lofty constitution.

This is racial politics at its worst. The current spate of unnecessary and punitive voter rights restrictions and increased incarceration of immigrants come from this very same playbook.

Our enslavers have re-imagined America’s criminal justice and prison systems
to separate the races as surely as slavery and the era of Jim Crow ever did.

Like the Southern Strategy, the War on Drugs successfully capitalizes on undereducated and/or willfully uniformed white social hatred in order to anchor the right wing base, its core in the American south. Just as surely as the “Redemption” movement following the abolition of slavery brought forth this hatred through late 19th and early 20th century Jim Crow laws (voting restrictions, exclusion from sitting on juries, and segregation), the War on Drug’s Mass Incarceration is a colorblind Jim Crow that grew reactively to the racial equality gains obtained during the 1960s.

The more informed you become about the breadth and depth of this wicked conspiracy, how your money is being spent every day to uphold American’s new caste system, the more you may want to work at the grassroots to stop these racist lawmakers and judges who roam free in our seemingly colorblind society. A huge target of our activism is the corrupt, multi-billion dollar, corporate, for-profit prison industry that conspires with the government and banking industry to facilitate this systematic and permanent disenfranchisement of people of color in this country. The U.S. incarcerates more of its citizens than any country, 730 in the prison population per per 100,000 of its national population population compared to countries like Norway (75 per 100,000) or even Uganda (92 per 100,000).

Organizations such as The Prison Divestment Campaign and The Sentencing Project have been leading the way in disrupting this mean-spirited profiteering that is powered by the War on Drugs. The corporate gains derived from Mass Incarceration represent a conflict of interest that is so large it cannot be seen with an uneducated eye.

Consider that up to $200.oo of your hard-earned money paid as taxes is being spent  today and everyday on each of the 99,000 individuals housed in a for-profit prison. And, while we pay and pay to put people in prisons for the most minor offenses, we allow these corporations free access to lobby lawmakers, judges, and police unions for longer and harsher sentences, as well as tax deductions to build more and larger for-profit prisons.

As long as our government continues to federalize local and state law enforcement, and offer financial rewards to local drug task forces for maximizing arrests and convictions, this multi-billion dollar industry prospers and grows.

Sadly some of these bankers (e.g. Wells Fargo) and lawmakers (e.g. Gov. Jan Brewer) become investors in these same corporations, that last year reaped $74 billion in profits. They have blood and suffering on their dirty hands.

We have DEA agents and the Pentagon involved in bringing this federal program to your neighborhood by encouraging local drug task forces with huge amounts of federal money, equipment, training, arms and munitions, totaling billions of dollars each year. This breaks legal limits on the federal government’s involvement in local law enforcement, and tremendous power is granted to these task forces. They even profit from the spoils of their arrests, including cash, cars, houses, etc., seized during these arrests, even when the victim is found ultimately to be not guilty. As long as they make arrests and show results, the lucrative gravy train continues to flow into local and state budgets.

Take one example: SWAT. The number of SWAT vehicles and teams, formerly only used in to assail violent criminals, has increased. Where there were once 2 or 3 SWATs there are now 20. SWAT is now routinely, and primarily, used by these drug task forces to break down people’s doors in the middle of the night based on suspicions of drug possession. We can only hope these militarized teams are never turned on the entire population with some other justification because they are in place to terrorize whole communities.

This wholesale militarization of local and state law enforcement is an unlawful usurpation of our rights under the U.S. Constitution, and should make us all get off our couches and do something about it.

Look for more on this subject, soon.  Also, see Mass Incarceration: Follow the Money (Part 1).

Anastasia Person contributed to this post.

Image Source (SWAT enters CII RPI): Simon Sarris

Image Source (Nash SpecOps Equipment): SD Lewis

in Campaigns / End Police Bias / Grassroots / Key Issues / Public Information / Transunity & Transleadership  by 25 Aug 2012 0 comments

Mass Incarceration: Follow the Money (Part 1)

Take a walk through America’s unconstitutional militarization of
local and statelaw enforcement, based on racial hatred and racial politics,
and the training, munitions, and financial incentives that support it.

Since we finished reading legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s startling book, The New Jim Crow, we decided to speak up more on the toll and tragedy of Mass Incarceration in the United States. More than that, we want to urge everyone to join the grassroots uprising meant to cure America of its addiction to racial politics and end this national scourge.

Your banks’ investments and your tax dollars contribute to the billions being spent year after year to finance a criminal justice system and a system of Mass Incarceration that are creating a new, unredeemable American caste system and destroying the lives of millions of people of color and their families. It’s a national tragedy right under our noses.

All three branches of our government, including the Pentagon, colluding with U.S. banks and the corporate for-profit prison industry,  have conspired to systematically disenfranchise almost 6 million people of color for minor infractions and petty crimes programmatically ignored among the white populace.

Because of the War on Drugs (1971), young adults of color are arrested and imprisoned, and become lifelong second-class citizens, at 5.6 times the rate of their white counterparts even though they comprise under 20% of the population. Unfairly, as felons they permanently lose all access to community benefits including public housing and job training. They lose their families and children because they can’t get housing and cannot obtain legitimate employment. In spite of having “paid their debt” to society, they often cannot vote or sit on juries. They are forever second-class citizens sentenced to a marginal life.

Consider that for every youth of color who is stopped and frisked for a small amount of marijuana today, there are 9 of his or her white counterparts who will possess and use that same amount today without any repercussions. The lucky white kids are free, unencumbered, never questioned, and go on to college or a job without a hitch.

The War on Drugs simply does not target white youth or adults. Rather, it focuses on random sidewalk searches (“stop and frisk”), sweeps of bus terminals, and profiling on our nation’s highways. Simply, people of color are the obvious “low hanging fruit” for local drug task forces to keep federal dollars, training, and munitions flowing into their local coffers, in amounts so great that no state or local governments can ever (or ever could) ignore. Alexander notes Phillip Smith’s “Federal Budget: Economic Stimulus Bill Stimulates Drug War, Too,” (Drug War Chronicle, no. 573, February 20, 2009) to point that funding has increased through the Economic Recovery Act of 2009, doubling down on money spent at the local level in prosecuting the War on Drugs.

We have now, without even realizing it or checking it, allowed for creation of a Police State.

We have been seeing this information slowly trickle in through the media. Recently, Lawrence O’Donnell, on his MSNBC show, The Last Word, very well summed up The New Jim Crow. These 5 on-air minutes should be the rallying cry for a new activism that says no, unequivocally, to the War on Drugs.

For more, go to Mass Incarceration: Follow The Money (Part 2).

 Anastasia Person contributed to this post.

 Image Source (Inmates Orleans Parish Prison) : Bart Everson

Image Source (Street Arrest – NARA): Yoichi R. (Yoichi Robert) Okamoto

in Campaigns / End Police Bias / Grassroots / Key Issues / Public Information / Transunity & Transleadership  by 23 Aug 2012 0 comments

Take Heart, Evidence Pouring in Hourly (Part 1)

Photo by Håkan Dahlström Flickr/creative commons

Photo by Håkan Dahlström
Flickr/creative commons

The far right believes they have a chance
to remake the world into the christian,
capitalist theocracy they have always wanted.

Even liberal media says, “If they win
this election cycle
they will do things that would
reverse history for 75 years!”

But none of that’s going to happen.

Just before the U.S. Election a week ago, I put forth the theory that non-Republicans should not fear, in fact we ought to take heart — that the probable Republican takeover the Senate and their increased footprint in the House were going to be good things for progressives. This is the right time in history to put these jokers on full display and in sharper relief so that everyone, at least more and more people, can see them for whom they really are.

Since the election, I’ve taken particular delight in just how fast and furious the Republicans are continuing to repudiate their reputations and dispel their humanity in the things they do and say. The timeline for their backward thinking to be completely expunged here and abroad has been immeasurably upstepped. The circumstances for progressives to act boldly have arrived.

Check the bread and circus for yourself. Don’t take my word for it. Assess for yourself the relative levels of buffoonery in whatever issue Repubs haplessly find themselves talking about, from the climate, the military, technology, you name it. Nothing they do or say suggest any understanding of the inherent equality of all people, of history, or even how our government actually works.

The only measurement we have, the one that matters, is the amount of special interest cash that is always involved. Whenever and wherever we follow the money, it leads to what’s rotten. Fortunately, these rotten cavities of entrenched special interests, rewarding corporate elites at everyone else’s expense, also offer a crystal clear roadmap for populists and all activists devoted to economic and social justice.

Some of my musings on this subject can be found in Part 2, tomorrow, and I would enjoy hearing from you if you too see it for yourself and want to share, here or on Facebook. (Maybe I should start numbering each of their rabbit holes for posterity.)

Each time one of them opens their mouth to speak, they show themselves to be, at best, uninformed, and, at worse, delusional. A shady combo of plain greed and stupidity takes over their thinking. It doesn’t appear they’ve read the news or read a book or seem to have studied much in college or since. Add to that the sweaty hysteria of desperate people driven by fear gasping for relevance, it’s almost sad (but not, really).

In VenusPlusX’s quest for a more perfect world of peace and universal equality, where every child born survives with all of its human rights unchallenged, we of course continue to focus on life-threatening issues such as climate change and the military and supporting net neutrality to make sure all voices are heard.

Freedom will not be a reality until we address the most pressing problems, the ones that are direct threats to life on this planet. The good news is that it will be the process of our joining together across borders and cultures to solve these life-threatening problems that will perforce bring about solutions to all the scaffolding issues such as ending racism, sexism, genderism, xenophobia, ageism, income inequality, and unharnessed capital greed.

Solving these planetary problems will re-enfranchise the voiceless of this world, and make sure we do have a world. Get active, do something. If you are already an activist in any area, continue to connect the dots between all of these issues — they are all connected, and all, in the end, are matters of life and death.

 

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in Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized  by 14 Nov 2014 0 comments

Stay Informed. Stay Active.

Light Brigading Flickr/creative commons

Light Brigading
Flickr/creative commons

We speculate that unlike the consciousness raising on gun control following the Newtown Massacre, which petered out along partisan lines since the National Rifle Association owns most of the U.S. Congress, this singular event in Ferguson will succeed in merging the message with the messenger at just the right moment. It has brought about a laser-focus on the rotten mass of shameful, bankrupt, coercive, and inhumane systems, forcing elected officials, conservative and liberal alike, to say, wait a damn minute.

 “The eyes of the nation and the world are watching Ferguson right now. The world is watching because the issues raised by the shooting of Michael Brown predate this incident. This is something that has a history to it and the history simmers beneath the surface in more communities than just Ferguson.” — Attorney General Eric Holder

Politicians can ignore these issues now, at their peril, but we will continue to pose the epic questions:

How will we end this country’s war on brown and black men, especially young men?

How will we demilitarize our police forces?

How will interfere with the scourge of mass incarceration?

How will we end our outsourcing to for-profit prison industry and the for-profit probation system?

We have to keep reminding ourselves that ALL of this is connected to greed and the money (including your tax dollars) that elites accumulate from the pain of others. The War on Drugs later upstepped by the War on Terror placed immense pressure for more arrests. Brown and black men have been the primary targets and the easiest targets. We pay for your senators, congressmen, and prosecutors to entertain for-profit prison industry lobbyists pushing for longer and stiffer sentences to increase their corporate bottom line. We penalize debtors further by putting them into for-profit probation programs at once increasing the original debt on a weekly basis and the likelihood of jail time for things like an overdue water bill.

More Americans have become aware that their hard earned tax dollars finance the military-style firepower we’ve seen on display in Ferguson. Add to that the local police’s sad rendition of how trained military personnel actually behave with these arms and equipment that has put all public safety at risk.

People united have all the power to stop all of this.

[Regarding a similar shooting in 1943 . . . ] The shooting, the funeral and the riot, taking place so close together, led Baldwin to realize that we must always hold in our minds two opposite ideas. The first is that “injustice is commonplace” in our world. But the second is that we cannot be complacent. We “must never … accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all [our] strength. This fight begins … in the heart.” (via Laila Lalami’s ‘This Fight Begins In The Heart’: Reading James Baldwin As Ferguson Seethes)

Stay informed. Stay active.

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Also see:
in Campaigns / End Police Bias / Events / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information  by 27 Aug 2014 0 comments

Jamelle Bouie Gives the Larger Picture

Photo by Steve Rhodes Flickr/creative commons

Photo by Steve Rhodes
Flickr/creative commons

Why the Fires in Ferguson Won’t End Soon

But while calm is hard to predict, one thing is clear: The events in Ferguson—from the shooting to the police response and everything since—are a product of familiar forces and stem from a familiar history. Put another way, the area’s long-bottled racial tension has burst, and it’s difficult to know if it can be resolved, much less contained. — Slate’s Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) 

In a mere 3000 words, Jamelle Bouie schools us in reality versus perception. The article is well worth a full read and understanding because it applies to every other American city. Here are some highlights . . .

Mr. Bouie aptly blends history with current events to put the Michael Brown shooting into a larger context. He forces us to recognize that modern events cannot be considered apart from St. Louis area’s dark history of segregation and police brutality.

An overbearing police presence is a defining feature of life in Ferguson and the rest of North County. Last year in Ferguson, 86 percent of stops, 92 percent of searches, and 93 percent of arrests involved blacks, despite the fact that police found more “contraband” stopping white residents than black ones. I spoke to several young men in Ferguson—all teenagers or in their early 20s—who said they were stopped on a weekly basis. At a makeshift Michael Brown memorial, I asked one 20-year-old how many times he’s stopped by police, “About 10 times a month,” he said.

Mr. Bouie takes us back to 100 years when St. Louis became one the first places to create African-American ghettos with boundaries illegal to cross, and sequestered areas where brown and black people were allowed to own homes.

He goes on to offer the best analysis of the facts I’ve seen anywhere, including a documented history of police brutality that breeds fear and disables any notion of serve and protect. He points us to The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (also a must read).

“Blacks were the easiest targets of the police; their rights were the least respected, and they had only a modicum of political influence to hold officers accountable.

Criminality was well-distributed among the ethnic and racial groups of the North, but blacks were disproportionate targets for police. The result was a perception of black criminality despite the lack of clear evidence it actually existed.”

This deep distrust of law enforcement stems from decades of unfair treatment, says Bouie, who suggest this is perhaps what motivates desperate looters. Unless we can turn this tide with new laws, policies, and human rights protections the current state of affairs will continue and there will continue to be police shootings of brown and black men in this country.

***

I submit that tonight in American there are hundreds of African-American parents forced to sit their young children down to explain how they should watch out for and behave in any encounter with the police. These hard truths rob these children of part of their childhood, making them feel there is something wrong with them in spite of their parents’ attempts to dispel that false and crippling notion.

Congressional panels and other inquiries are being launched to answer the epic questions raised by Michael Brown’s murder: the war on brown and black men in this country, police bias and brutality, systems of mass incarceration in for-profit prisons. It is our job to make sure we find the answers and create new, human, and voluntary associations to replace the coercive systems built on the pain of many for the advantages of the few.

We need to coproduce a world in which no mother ever has to have that conversation with her children.

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Also see:
in Campaigns / End Police Bias / Events / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information  by 22 Aug 2014 0 comments

Profit from Pain is Inhuman

I just finished reading a June 23 New Yorker magazine article, “Get Out of Jail, Inc.,” exposing on the crushing problems created by the private probation services which are thriving along with the private prison industry. The article references an important but perhaps overlooked February report from Human Rights Watch, cataloguing the lack of transparency in these services, across the South in particular.

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

This 72-page report describes how more than 1,000 courts in several US states delegate tremendous coercive power to companies that are often subject to little meaningful oversight or regulation. In many cases, the only reason people are put on probation is because they need time to pay off fines and court costs linked to minor crimes. In some of these cases, probation companies act more like abusive debt collectors than probation officers, charging the debtors for their services.

The New Yorker article tells many sad stories, including one mother who couldn’t find parking near her home because of construction street closing. She got a few parking tickets she couldn’t afford and was eventually arrested and placed in one these coercive probation programs. Under constant threat of being re-arrested and taken to jail (and away from her children and grandchildren whom she cared for) unless she brought cash to the probation center on weekly basis. These services charge very poor people not only their initial debt but large administration fees to maintain these services so as not be jailed. This mother, who initially owed just a few hundred dollars, was eventually dunned over $4000 which she definitely couldn’t pay.

If one of their clients requires electronic monitoring, the fees for surveillance are even higher, and the debtor becomes responsible for all of it.

Citing tighter and tighter municipal and state budgets, the use of these third-party probation services has skyrocketed despite their draconian tactics. So they save money in their budgets by not jailing or putting on probation their own citizens (their job), and instead farm them out to these third-party corporations, both parties profiting on the backs of poor people. Corporations are in the business of making lots of money, no matter who is exploited.

We have written about the scourge of the private prison industry and these probation service companies extend this same conflict of interest. These corporations profit through their inhumane and coercive system. Like the private prison industry, they lobby public officials to their own benefit, and government fails its own citizens by relinquishing its responsibility to do what tax payers have asked them to do.

We urge you to read the full report, and if you can get it the June 23 New Yorker article by Sara Stillman. It will make you want to get off your couch and do something to end these practices.

More: Mass Incarceration: Follow the Money, Part 1 and Part 2.

in Campaigns / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information  by 28 Jun 2014 0 comments

Not Your Typical “Driving While Black” Story

Black Youths Attending Princeton Conference Pulled Over by Police, Then This Happened

 

You are riding in a car with some friends, and you get pulled over by a cop. What do you do? A group of members from the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) responded to this predicament by exercising transformative justice, when they engaged in an enlightening conversation with the officer who stopped them as they left a campus event at Princeton University (Princeton, NJ). It was supposedly for a broken taillight that turned out not to be broken at all. When confronted by the carful of African-Americans who called this incident simply another case of Driving While Black, the officer said his feelings were hurt.

Turns out the officer was also African-American, proving the point that as people of color, we also profile against our very own, sometimes completely unaware of our prejudice. We must start accepting responsibility and treating one another with the respect that we wish other races would show more often.

Racial bias in any form is evil because it affects a person’s attitude and this plays a factor in the self-fulfilling, destructive behaviors that plague the black community. It’s time for us to stop passing the buck and reclaim our dignity.

What do you think? Was the officer in the wrong? Did the camera change the dynamic of the conversation? Is profiling ever justified?

Related – Mass Incarceration: Follow the Money

in News of Note  by 22 Apr 2014 0 comments

Blow the Whistle on Stop and Frisk Today

 

The Stop Mass Incarceration Network will be blowing the whistle on the NYPDs “stop and frisk” program. It is estimated that every day 2,000 New Yorkers 2000 of color get unconstitutionally stopped by police in the war on drugs. Organizers Carl Dix and Cornel West are calling on thousands of people in New York and nationwide to respond to the NYPD’s racial profiling by blowing a whistle. On September 13, whistles and palm cards will be distributed with instructions for people to blow whistles when they see the police violating the rights of citizens of color.

Get yourself a whistle and do the same in your city. I’m going to, I see it all the time.
Police bias and profiling of all sorts must be stopped. The result is that a person of color is 5.6 times more likely be become an ex-felon for a minor offense that his white counterparts do with impunity. VenusPlusX has been writing about stop and frisk, mass incarceration, and the for-profit prison industry that feeds on this in Mass Incarceration: Follow the Money, Part 1 and Part 2.

in Campaigns / Events / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Public Information  by 13 Sep 2012 0 comments

The King Center

Hope you all saw my hopeful letter to Martin, yesterday, but today I want to ask people to spend a little time further investigating the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and challenge everyone to get busy if they are not already in furthering his precepts though activism.

One of the best places to advance your education is The Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, known as The King Center. Here you will find thousands of digitized documents pertaining to his legacy which established and newly minted activists will find enlightening and empowering. Dr. King’s life and teachings are accessible and the most apt anchor to guide and ground our collective social justice campaigns while giving hope to all the individuals who today, more than ever before, are willing to lay down their lives on behalf of freedom for all people.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. November 15, 1964 Flickr/creative commons

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
November 15, 1964
Flickr/creative commons

The philosophy of Dr. King underpins his entire life and the lives of his many followers. At The King Center website, you can read all about it in just a few pages. It is guaranteed to give you a new or newly invigorated focus because he addresses the entire breadth of effective activism on any front, regardless of your specific cause for freedom: the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism that exist in an intersectional and vicious cycle; the six principles of nonviolence; the six steps to nonviolent social change; and, concluding, an outline of what Dr. King called, The Beloved Community. In your organizational spaces or at home, print out these few pages and put them on the wall; look and re-read them often.

The goal of Dr. King’s philosophy culminates in the realization of The Beloved Community, the future humane world where old, coercive, and inhumane systems are vanishing, and being replaced with new, voluntary, humane ways of doing things that do not leave anyone behind. VenusPlusX points to the same end point. Dr. King teaches us that this is not an idealistic, perfected world but one where the reconciliation of adversaries is based on a “mutual, determined commitment to non-violence,” where all conflicts are resolved peacefully, “a type of love that can transform opponents into friends.”

In his 1959 Sermon on Gandhi, Dr. King elaborated on the after-effects of choosing nonviolence over violence: “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle’s over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor.” In the same sermon, he contrasted violent versus nonviolent resistance to oppression. “The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But, the way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.”

Laying down one’s life for the cause of freedom is perhaps the best, the most noble thing you can do because until everyone is free, no one is free. (For those wondering, yes, that’s also a Jesusonian principle, that the greatest love we have have is to lay down our lives for a friend. But this doesn’t mean dying, it just means living another way.) I can have all the money in the world but if there is one child, perhaps a poor child, maybe a hungry child, living under an oppressive system, I cannot be silent. So I challenge all of you lurkers out there to commit just one hour, 60 minutes, on one day of the week, to do something to advance freedom for all people. You will find it is the most interesting and life-giving party around.

 

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in Campaigns / End Police Bias / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized  by 20 Jan 2015 0 comments