MLK Day Of Mourning

Today, we’re supposed to be celebrating how far we’ve come since the days of Jim Crow Laws, public lynchings of black people, for the crime of being black, and the end of black people being relegated to underpaying jobs (AKA: slavery) in hot fields picking our cotton and building our White House.

Since we have not come as far from those days, and attitudes of ignorant and arrogant bliss as we had led ourselves to believe, I will observe this day of would be celebration as a day of mourning.

Have we really progressed beyond the need to bolster our own self image, (as a people) by systematically harming and oppressing others? No. Here’s how we can tell:

• A man was denigrated and his career was threatened by our own “President” for kneeling on the football field, to peacefully protest the farce that is our national anthem. It touts bravery (when our “president” dodged the draft 5 times) and freedom, when that ideal remains but a fantasy for many, including: Our own poor, working class, and people commonly profiled by police officers, ICE and DEA agents.
• Police officers are rarely disciplined for profiling, and abusing people who look vulnerable or don’t look to be “White”. They get away with extreme and unnecessary brutality during the course of arbitrary arrests.
• More Black and Brown children are funneled directly from grade school classes into the prison system than any other American child, by percentage, (*1) and that prison system is about to be privatized by our politicians who will own those prisons, or somehow profit by them during their terms in office. (*2) Our “President” sits in a cushy chair, in a comfortable room, with constructed food (McDonald’s) and insults countries that he imagines to be “sh*thole countries”, (*3) and some politicians actually support his contribution of ignorant racism and divisiveness to our government, (*4) made obvious by his undignified speeches and boorish behavior toward emissaries and ambassadors on both American and foreign soil.

Those countries that he deems to be “sh*thole” countries are full of strong people made stronger by more than their fair share of natural disasters from which they had to extricate themselves, because their own government was negligent in sending them aid, just as our government has been negligent in sending aid to Puerto Rico, since the Hurricane, and to wildfire victims in California.

• Californians are now slaves to the US, since we still have to pay taxes to our Federal Government, after having suffered catastrophic losses due to the wildfires, without having received any aid for the damages from said “Federal Government” which was elected to “serve” us and our NEEDS, and the will of the American people. This is called TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.
• Many Californians (by percentage, more than in the rest of the US, taken all together) were “Unrepresented Peoples” long before the wildfires. We have always been rightly called the “Melting Pot” of the US, and have been fiscally and culturally enriched by our great variety of peoples.

We used to be Mexico, peopled by Mexicans, and Native Americans. When people migrated to America, they landed first in California, by ship. This is where they came to escape the tyrannies of monarchical rule, religious persecution, and the ravages of wars in their own countries that had destroyed their cities and killed their children, parents, and friends. (Those wars were often brought to their countries by America, or American soldiers when our government involved them in the wars of other countries).

Sadly, and to our shame, Martin Luther King would find almost no part of his proud dream alive, here, in America, Today.

Bigots have come out of the woodwork, empowered by our “great leader” in the Oval Office, to march the streets with torches and ugly sentiments on their lips for the immigrants that have always been the backbone of the American economy. They are protected by the law when they drive their cars into peaceful protesters on the side of equal justice for ALL and have continued to wear white robes pointed over the crowns of their heads and covering their deplorable faces as they attempt to intimidate Black people, and “put them in their place” ……….again.

This post then is my ode to you, Mr. King.

It is my tribute to your wondrous vision of peace among our people, for the sake of an enriched and ever more greatly prospering whole, that would have been America, and still could, if she were to choose to follow a leader like you, rather than like tRump.

America can still be the respectable force with which to be reckoned that we had started to become, before the inauguration of our illegitimate President. We were on our way to leveling the playing field for all our various peoples, such that all children were starting to get a real education, no matter “which side of the railroad tracks they came from”. Along with that education, they were starting to get free school lunches, when they were in need.

Our local communities had started up programs to feed hungry children breakfasts at schools as well as those free lunches, and lunches at libraries on weekends and during Summer breaks. We (here at the local level, again) had created food delivery programs for our elders and shut-ins, and our government makes us all slaves to debt, when they make cutbacks on funding aid for these types of programs, and Social Security (into which our elders paid, all their working lives) and Medicare/caid programs and food stamp programs.

The more we allow our Federal Government to withhold financial aid from Federally funded welfare type programs, (when they were elected to advance OUR needs) the more we become slaves to those politicians, their cronies who make up the 1% and the corporate greed that they serve and protect, because it suits their own traitorous agendas. The further down the road we go, of allowing ourselves to be led by people who divide us from each other, (because in unity there is strength) the further we get from being able to:

• Get out of personal debt,
• Feed our kids
• Pay rent
• Make payments on the car that gets us to work
• Protect our freedoms

We can only protect our freedoms when we can comprehend the ballots. We can only do that, when we are educated. The uneducated will always be slaves to the vile Earth wasting agendas of the current regime. The current regime will, happily, keep our minds enslaved to religion, because religion teaches unswerving and unquestioning faith.

Faith doesn’t vote to require politicians to pass environment protecting bills, or to fund the scientific research into what destroys the environment. It doesn’t challenge the status quo, or question the wisdom of parents, teachers, priests, or politicians. It simply follows.

Children raised in faith, (generally in lieu of an education) are easily made slaves to the sexual perversions of the elders that they are taught to blindly trust. Those religious leaders and their supporters are only too glad to have a “President” in their pocket, so that they can get away with molesting the children of their parishioners.

Why not? If the “President” can be a self- proclaimed and proud “pussy- grabber” then what actions can we hold up in front of our children as sins or crimes?

If kids were, instead, to learn to read, then they would be able to understand the effect of Man on the ozone layer and on climate change. If they began to understand that, then tRump would no longer be able to protect his corporate backers, by deregulating their factories, such that they are allowed to dump their bio-hazardous and toxic waste materials into our waterways (from which we have to drink). This deregulating and dumping has already started, along with the reversal of laws that disallowed the “hunting” of wild animals in their winter dens and burrows, during their hibernations.

Nestle has too long been allowed (by our Federal Government, again) to steal water from California, only to sell it in plastic bottles that further toxify the Earth and the air we breathe, when they are dumped into landfills (all over America).

In this way, you are as much a slave to our current regime, as anyone else. Your Federal Government is slowly poisoning you, and by not punishing or holding corporations accountable for poisoning your water (Flint Mich) and the air you breathe, they have made you as much a second class citizen as any Black person before the end of the dispicable Jim Crow era.

You,……. as an individual,……. and your needs are SECOND, in the eyes of your Federal Government. SECOND to the desires of the corporations that are poisoning you and our Earth.

That puts you in the same boat with every other human being on Earth, because there is no human being that can survive eating or drinking of the Earth, once it is poisoned.

You can be as entitled as you wish to believe you are, to the moniker of Patriotic American, or White, or Citizen of the United States, and you are still going to die, just like the rest of us, of slow poisoning, because your “Great Leader” has seen fit to pull us out of the Paris Accords, that helped to protect the cleanliness and integrity of our air, land, water, ozone layer and climate. He has made it legal to kill off entire animal species, one animal at a time, while they hibernate. He has made it safe for corporate CEOs to take advantage of their employees, and not be held accountable for that, or for dumping waste into our waterways that seep into the land, and poison our food crops as well. He has alienated global powers around us, so that they have begun to eschew trade agreements with the US, costing the US Millions of dollars, in the industries of trade, tourism, and farming.

Workers in EACH of those industries have lost jobs, as well as in the Coal Mining industry, which tRump had promised to renew, so they are now also slaves to the (lack of) economy created by our Federal Government, as much as you are, or will be, soon.

What can we do to better our chances for physical and fiscal survival, in spite of our Federal Government? We must create a new Federal Government. We must create a Federal Government that serves it’s constituency.

In order to serve it’s constituency, a government must make informed and commonly decent decisions on matters of environmental protections, civil rights protections, and upgrades to the educational system, that funnels experts into its ranks of supporters that help them to make all their informed decisions.

Informed people know that war destroys the ecosystem, and environment, and other informed people know how to avoid war through diplomacy. It really is that simple. ………for a country that is run by a government that puts it’s planet and people before corporate greed.

(*1): http://riaclu.org/images/uploads/School_to_Prison_Pipeline_in_Black_and_White_2015.pdf

(*2): http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/18/politics/private-prison-department-of-justice/index.html

(*3): http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/11/politics/immigrants-shithole-countries-trump/index.html

(*4): http://www.dispatch.com/news/20180112/renacci-defends-kasich-condemns-trumps-s-hole-remark