Are we the nation of Martin Luther King or Bull Connor?

[yurbud]

While flipping through the pages of a photography book, I was stopped cold by this picture: a cop trying to wrestle an American flag away from a little black boy back during the Civil Rights struggle. I thought that summed up the era better than any other photo. It was like the cop telling him this wasn't his country, America didn't belong to him, even though his ancestors might have been here longer than the white cop's.



As John McCain's election prospects dim, and his campaign relies on fear-mongering and name-calling bordering on inciting violence, and even voter suppression tactics borrowed from the Jim Crow era, it is clear we are back to the cultural crossroads we faced in the early 1960s: do we choose to be the nation of Bull Connor, who became the symbol of the stand against Civil Rights, or the object of his wrath, Martin Luther King?

Bull Connor's America was much like the right today. There was chest-thumping patriotism (or at least regional pride) and loud claims to be superior to every other races and culture while at the same time committing the most brutal acts of violence against those simply demanding that we live up to our own stated ideals. But to the Bull Connors, equality, due process, and democracy were the rights of only a certain tribe not all who were born or live here. Even the sanctity of one's own body and right to life belonged only to the tribe, and the people outside the tribe could be used for labor, sex, or even killed at the whim of the tribe.



That same hypocrisy at home led to even worse hypocrisy abroad--if our businesses needed something a country had, the government of that country damn well better give it to them on terms the business dictates, or we will take it by force and install a government that knows who's the boss. "They" are not part of "us," so they have no rights we need to worry about.

http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2008/10/are-we-nation-of-martin-luther-king-or.html">FULL TEXT