crossposted from Liberal Street Fighter

It is in the interests of the ruling class of this country that the divisions between us be maintained. We are carefully separated into racial groups, income groups, educational groups ... into easily catagorized demographics. Easier to target commercials for things we don't need, easier to target agit-prop and hatred and envy ... easier to use words as rhetorical and psychological IED's to blow people away from one another. Economics is politics is opportunity is war is love is community is ... EVERYTHING. All connected, but better for the hoi polloi to remain blind to that.

Today we remember Dr. King's legacy on his time-shifted birthday, a life commemorated at least partly by the man who actually WAS elected President in 2000, only he didn't want it bad enough then to fight for it. Ever since he's been giving stronger and more impassioned speeches about the threat to a better America posed by the criminal cabal that occupies the White House, the Legislature and increasingly the Federal Courts. Al Gore highlighted something that connects Dr. King's struggles with the threats we face now from our own government:

So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people.

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the "most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country" and vowed to "take him off his pedestal." The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

The permanent government has acted thusly over and over again in our history. Fitfully, the people have fought back, slowly opening up access to opportunity for all, for all races, for women and labor and people who have their own unique roads to follow. Whenever the people have done so, those with power and wealth have counter-attacked. Strikebreaking, ostracism, agressive and abusive policing. They've locked up, beaten, spied upon, abused and killed American citizens. In the past, leaders have emerged from movements, movements of people of good faith, an abiding faith that we have more in common than we have in our differences. Do we have that thirst for freedom, for connection and community and mutual enrichment and growth?

There have of course been other periods of American history when the Executive Branch claimed new powers that were later seen as excessive and mistaken. Our second president, John Adams, passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts and sought to silence and imprison critics and political opponents.

When his successor, Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses he said: "[The essential principles of our Government] form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation... [S]hould we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety."

What will it take for the people to rise up and "retrace our steps"? It's not enough to just lean on political parties, to expect them to lead without knowing that they have a citizen army behind them if they stick their necks out. We all know this from our daily lives: nothing is harder to do in a group that saying, "no, but ...", and in Bush's America, the consequences are VERY high. It's not enough to blame the press: their jobs are at constant peril under corporate ownership who help and profit the Republican's agenda. Yes, those institutions, ALL of our institutions, have failed, continue to fail, but it's not enough to point fingers. NO, the PEOPLE need to lead, the people need to forge connections and DEMAND working institutions:

But there is yet another Constitutional player whose pulse must be taken and whose role must be examined in order to understand the dangerous imbalance that has emerged with the efforts by the Executive Branch to dominate our constitutional system.

We the people are-collectively-still the key to the survival of America's democracy. We-as Lincoln put it, "[e]ven we here"-must examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and degradation of our democracy.

Thomas Jefferson said: "An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will."

The revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was based was the audacious belief that people can govern themselves and responsibly exercise the ultimate authority in self-government. This insight proceeded inevitably from the bedrock principle articulated by the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: "All just power is derived from the consent of the governed."

The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now in such danger was created with the full and widespread participation of the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the day, widely-read newspaper essays, and they represented only one of twenty-four series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia.

Indeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the people - in their various States - that refused to confirm the result until, at their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document sent forward for ratification.

And it is "We the people" who must now find once again the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution.

It's counter-productive for one group of activists to claim that other "single issue groups" make the Democrats lose. It's wrong for one group to point at another and another and so on around the silly fundraising daisy chain, wrong and counterproductive. We are all connected. When women, when immigrants, when GBLT, when the poor, when white and brown and black and yellow and red ALL have opportunities expanded they ALL benefit in the long run. It's when we allow the bosses, the politicians, the preachers and police convince us that HE/SHE/IT/THEY/THEM are the problem, INSTEAD of the bosses picking our pockets and living off the capital born of our labor, our ideas, our communities and culture that we ALL lose. Without at least some of us giving into their words of greed, of hatred, to their calls for repeated wars and expanded exploitation those with the most wouldn't be able to make us all so easily complicit in their crimes.

It's important to remember that Dr. King, before they murdered him, before they brought down the bridges he was trying to build between all of us, was in Memphis to support a Union picket line. It's important to remember that exactly a year before they slaughtered him he stood in Riverside Church and tied American imperialism and greed to our own racial and class problems here at home:

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision.* There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. 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 this 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.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And 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. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, 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 ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask 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 the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

We need to look BEYOND the divides that have been inculcated in us, by our parents and our churches and our cultures and maybe perhaps the very genes that once helped us survive in the wild, for it is not in recognizing DIFFERENCES where our salvation lies, but in recognizing CONNECTIONS. The miners in Appalachia are abandoned to the rapacious greed of the fossil fuels industry as surely as the residents of the Gulf Coast. None of our children are receiving educations, many of our elders can't afford their medicines, too many of our neighbors sink beneath the waves of increasing debt and diminishing opportunities. Dr. King's last years were a desperate search to help Americans see ALL of these connections. We need to see that racism, sexism, homophobia, classism are ALL mere fodder to feed more dollars into the hopper, to move more wealth up the American food chain, more blood and treasure to feed into imperial war.

If we can't do that, then saving our country will fall to angry young men with rifles and explosives. The disparities growing in our country, the injustice of one people's bodies left to rot in the tropical heat while only a short time ago another group of victims was carefully collected with tweezers and armies of technicians will only build up pressure. Cultures are big machines, and imbalances ALWAYS create rebalancings. Do we want to wait until we have blood in our streets again? Can we AFFORD to wait, in this age of fifty-caliber sniper rifles and easily converted machine guns, in a nation who's police are increasingly trigger happy and armed like special operations soldiers? As devastating as the Civil War was, are we going to just go along while our current Cold Culture War heats up and conflict explodes?

This is beyond political party now. BOTH parties serve the current economic order, and poor and working class are not represented by either. They are indeed pandered to, with amendments to "protect" marriage on the one hand to promises to "protect the vote" or "protect choice" on the other, but these are only puppet shows. Elements of these promises are only enacted to keep the heat up, to foster the divisions, to exploit anger to mine votes, NOT to actually solve any of the very real problems we face.

Dr. King said, on the night before he was slaughtered, that he was glad to have lived in his time of struggle, that we ALL must be glad for the honor to fight for a better world.

As you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" — I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there. I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality.

But I wouldn't stop there. I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and esthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even go by the way that the man for whom I'm named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church in Wittenberg.

But I wouldn't stop there. I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

But I wouldn't stop there. Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy." Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a away that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — "We want to be free."

And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we're going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demand didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.

We got off track after he and other leaders were murdered. We became disheartened. We forgot our connections. We let the idea that we could all wear the same brand-named clothes convince us that the struggle had been won. We forgot that we are all connected, we are all related, even those we call our enemies. Our sisters and brothers in South and Central America have remembered ... when will we join them? Not all of us need take to the streets. Talk to those you love. Don't back down when the Dittohead in the cube next to you suggests that it's not right to discuss politics at work after you've listened to his bile for the past hour. Write letters, blog, march if you can. TALK. Share what you know with those in your life. When we get past the labels, past the marketed differences to talk about the real problems we face. Those of us on the left have to be willing to treat BOTH parties as the problem until we can get one of them to again fight for solutions to the real problems of the people. Perhaps, as 2006 and 2008 heat up, we'll need to find independents and third parties to support nationally while we reclaim politics locally. Hell, Bob Barr and Al Gore found common ground today, on Martin Luther King's birthday, to find common ground to speak out against a common threat.

For every bridge those in power destroy, we can build three more. It will take time, it will be heartbreaking, but on this hard-won national holiday to commemorate a bridge-builder, a preacher who saw our commonalities and found strength in them we must reaffirm the need for change, for real reform. If we can't do that, there will be a greater price paid in blood, and it won't all be soaked up by distant sands.