The Last Passion of the Democratic PartyThe murders of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman in a summer that was a racial tinderbox for America, along with the bombing of a church that killed young black girls, set the civil rights movement aflame... The vision of a democracy that belonged to every citizen of the United states -- regardless of race, creed or color -- was to belatedly become law as Lyndon Johnson, a gnarly, old school Texan Southern Democrat -- who somehow had truly been touched by the injustice of racism -- embraced a new guarantee of equality for every American. It was, perhaps, the last time that the Democratic Party leadership stood passionately behind an issue that was integral to the preservation of the goals and grandeur of our revolutionary heritage -- and to the promise of our Constitution and democracy.
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Conviction can move mountains; it can make the dreams of a Martin Luther King Jr. come true; it can change the attitudes of millions of Americans and appeal to their higher sense of fairness and decency. But if you don't have conviction, you can't have passion -- and if you don't have passion, you're just sitting in the shadow of those who do. Unfortunately, this means that the right wing's passion marginalizes most of the Democrats in Congress into insignificant timid back benchers.
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Through a sadly ironic series of circumstances, the editor of BuzzFlash.com found himself in the middle of the dusty town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, in August of this summer.... We had stopped...after dropping our son off at college in New Orleans, a week before Katrina hit. He left within five days with his roommates. The poor, mostly black, weren't so lucky. The Busheviks and FEMA were merely carrying on the spirit of Philadelphia, MS (circa 1964) -- -- swirled together with a giant dose of incompetence -- when they abandoned the Crescent City for four days. And local bigots, like the Gretna police who wouldn't let blacks walk across the Mississippi River bridge to safety, reminded us that the Southern Strategy that has been the underpinning of the Republican Party since Nixon was elected is, ironically, largely a reaction to the implementation of the voting and civil rights acts in the '60s.
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Maybe it began with Rosa Parks. Maybe it began when the Daughters of the American Revolution wouldn't let Marian Anderson sing in their Washington, D.C., Hall in the first part of the last century... Maybe it became a thunderstorm of righteousness when Martin Luther King Jr. preached Biblical, stirring words of emancipation, freedom, and equality. The Democratic Party knew that the time had come to choose the fork in the road that led to justice -- and they embraced it, fought for it, died for it, and didn't let up until they had achieved their goal. It was the last great passion of the Democratic Party....
Democracy is the greatest experiment in government, a gift to all who are privileged to be Americans,
and it faces a dire threat.
If this does not provoke passion, what will?The Last Passion of the Democratic Party
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