Today's Today

MLK Day.

This one made me a little misty.

Today's Today

Overheard

Republicans who reverently quoted MLK yesterday will be right back to taking pictures with Confederate flags today.

Today's Today

"Give us the ballot and we will place judges on the bench ... who will do justly and love mercy. Give us the ballot and we will quietly and nonviolently, without rancor or bitterness, implement the Supreme Court's decision of May 17, 1954."

“I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting.“ - MLK

59 years later, we are facing the same tragedy. pic.twitter.com/xEgLTTgVTC

— Charles Booker (@Booker4KY) January 13, 2022

Today's Today

We are bound together.

Shed A Little Light - James Taylor

Today's Today

This is the day a lot of people go outa their way pretending they're totally down with MLK and that they've always believed in everything he advocated - as long as they can also pretend he never said things like this:

Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources.  With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That's the way the system works. And since we know the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.

-- Martin Luther King

He was engaged in a campaign to support the concept of a Guaranteed Basic Income when he was murdered in Memphis, April 1968

On MLK Yesterday

Tim Wise, at Univ of Michigan:

The Baldwin quote (Jet Magazine, 1965):

People who imagine that history flatters them - as it does indeed, since they wrote it - are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin, and they become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world. This is where it appears to me most white Americans find themselves - impaled. They are dimly, or perhaps vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie. But they do not know how to be released from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.

If we want the world to be a better place, the first thing we have to do is to stop insisting that it can't be.

Today's Today

Today's Today

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

--MLK

It's Not Coincidence

"Shithole countries" comes practically on the eve of MLK Day.

And last year, a day or so ahead of MLK Day, 45* took a shit on John Lewis's head.

Michael Edison Hayden, Crooks & Liars
(Posted with permission from Newsweek)

President Donald Trump’s already infamous “shithole” comment is among several remarks the commander-in-chief has made that have energized white supremacists, rights groups fear.

Trump made the comment Thursday in the context of asking why America should accept more immigrants from Haiti and Africa—instead of places like Norway—while discussing a bipartisan immigration deal with lawmakers. The remark reinvigorated accusations that Trump is a racist, and it was embraced online by white supremacists David Duke and Richard Spencer.
We seem to have an emerging trend here. 45* knows he can't break with tradition completely just yet. He'll issue the annual MLK tribute, even though he has no regard for people of color, but he wants to stay in good stead with Duke and Spencer while seeming not to.

So he shits on Lewis and drops the shithole bomb as a way of sending a nice little wink and a nudge to the crazies: "Don't worry fellas - you know I'm not going to mean anything with this MLK shit, right?"

Today's Today

Things were pretty lousy way back then.

So much better now.

no justice - no peace

Know Justice - Know Peace

Today's Quote

I get the whole bit about "micro-agressions" and all, but I think I like it better in its original form:

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them. --Martin Luther King, Jr

hat tip = @zimbabwekid

Today's Tweet

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience..." #MLKDay2016 #MLK pic.twitter.com/Uq3JkU9KJ2

— The King Center (@TheKingCenter) January 18, 2016

MLK Day

Civil Disobedience is an honored tradition in USAmerica Inc.  As long as you do it right - with respect for the rule of law.  Even when you're resisting a law you believe is unjust, you still adhere to the greater concept of A Nation Of Laws.

He got arrested too😒🙄........ Happy Birthday Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. !!!!#MLK ✊🏾 pic.twitter.com/bEIOfAG0LK

— HBCU Buzz (@HBCUBuzz) January 15, 2016

And now for today's Check-Your-White-Privilege Quiz:

Here we see LBJ meeting with MLK and "other black leaders" in the run up to The Civil Rights Act in 1964 - can you name any of those 3 other guys?

Just Shut Up And Listen

17 minutes that started continued some pretty momentous change.  The prospect of change (and the agents of that change) proved so scary and dangerous that the authoritarian assholes among us moved quickly to try to kill it.



The problems King was trying to tell us about haven't gone away.

Here's one of the more imprtant points from a longer talk by Tim Wise - I've put this one up a coupla times before, and I'll keep going back to it until I can recite it verbatim:



It's about what's fair vs what's unfair.  It's about getting USAmerica Inc to live up to its promises, and to stand by its word.  It's about demanding "the power" to behave like regular human beings.

We should never expect anything more, and we must never accept anything less.

And also too - if this doesn't apply to you, then why're you gettin' all bent outa shape about it?