We honor Dr. King today in stone. Let us honor him tomorrow and every day -- for as long as it takes -- with powerful, persistent voices and unrelenting nonviolent action to rescue his dream -- America's dream -- from the clutches of materialism, militarism, racism and poverty he warned would be America's undoing.
In his last Sunday sermon at Washington National Cathedral, Dr. King retold the parable of the rich man Dives who ignored the poor and sick man Lazarus who came every day seeking crumbs from Dives' table. Dives went to hell, Dr. King said, not because he was rich but because he did not realize his wealth was his opportunity to bridge the gulf separating him from his brother Lazarus and allowed him to become invisible. Calling for a Poor People's Campaign, he warned this could happen to America, the richest nation on earth. The day he was assassinated, he called his mother to give her his next Sunday's sermon title: "Why America May Go to Hell." He warned that "America is going to hell if we don't use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life."
He called with urgency for a Poor People's Campaign in 1968 when there were 25.4 million poor Americans including 11 million poor children and our GDP was $4.13 trillion. Today there are 46.2 million poor people including 16.4 million poor children and I've no doubt he'd be leading another campaign to end poverty and to create jobs and income for everyone in America. He would be dismayed that 20.5 million of our neighbors are living in extreme poverty including 7.4 million children who are the poorest age group in America. And the younger they are the poorer they are. One in four or 5.5 million infants, toddlers and preschoolers were poor in 2010, the years of greatest brain development.
Children don't have any belts to tighten and face more and more cuts in survival programs. The New York Times reported in 2010 that almost six million Americans had no income -- one in 50 -- and depended on Food Stamps to stave off the wolves of hunger. What has happened in America that we have normalized child and family poverty, homelessness and hunger -- punishing innocents with federal and state cuts for budget deficits they did not cause while 279 current members of Congress (238 Representatives and 41 Senators) have pledged not to ask the wealthiest corporations and individuals to pay a dime in new taxes to restore some of the hundreds of billions they drained from taxpayer coffers that have nearly bankrupted our nation and torn asunder the lives and hopes and futures of millions of Americans?
Beginning today, let's honor Dr. King by our committed action to end child poverty and close the morally obscene gulf between rich and poor in our nation where the 400 highest income earners made as much as the combined tax revenues of 22 states. They don't need any more tax breaks and need to give back some of their unfair share of our nation's tax subsidies and bailouts to feed and house and educate our children and employ their parents.
Let's follow Dr. King by naming and changing the pervasive racial disparities, undergirded by poverty, that place one in three Black and one in six Hispanic boys born in 2001 at risk of prison in their lifetimes. Incarceration is becoming the new American apartheid and poor children of color are its fodder. Let's reroute our children into a pipeline to college and productive work to compete with children from China and India and enable our children to compete economically in a globalizing economy.
Let's honor Dr. King by speaking truth to power and demanding justice for the poor and vulnerable children with our voices and votes and powerful persistent nonviolent direct actions. Citizens of every race and income level must band together to bring our nation back from the brink of self-destruction fueled by unbridled greed of the few and a military budget that dwarfs our early childhood development budget where the real security of our nation lies.
Let's honor Dr. King by stopping the resurgence of racial segregation in our schools, unfair treatment of children of color through zero tolerance school discipline and special education practices that push them out of school and towards prison. And we must stand together and resist efforts to undermine the hard-earned right to vote, which is the life blood of democracy. Let's not return to Jim Crow shenanigans that denied the right to vote to Blacks and other citizens and strangled our democratic processes far too long.
Let's honor Dr. King by building a beloved community in America where all have enough to eat, a place to sleep, and enough work at decent wages to support a family, buy a home, and raise children in safe neighborhoods.
Let's truly honor Dr. King by transforming our education system that sentences millions of children to social and economic death by failing to prepare them and our country for the future. That more than a majority of children in all income and racial groups and nearly 80 percent of Black and Hispanic children cannot read or compute at grade level in 4th, 8th, and 12th grades is a national catastrophe which will bring our nation down.
Let's honor Dr. King by ending the violent wars within and without that destroy lives, families, communities, and drain life-giving resources on weapons of death rather than weapons of life. The guns that snuffed out Dr. King's life have snuffed out the lives of over 110,645 children since 1979. Every three hours a child or teen is killed by a firearm in the United States.
Let's honor Dr. King with our unrelenting efforts to ensure that "the bank of justice" is not bankrupted further and like him refuse to accept "there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of the nation." Let's send the bounced checks of jobs, quality education, food and early childhood development back to Congress and state capitols and tell them to refill our nation's insufficient bank accounts with transfers from the overflowing coffers of powerful corporations and individuals from unjust tax breaks and subsidies, and to pay the long overdue promissory notes of justice and hope millions of children are waiting to receive from the crumbs of Dives' table.
The day after Dr. King was shot, I went into riot torn Washington, D.C. neighborhoods and schools urging children not to loot, get arrested and ruin their futures. A young Black boy about 12 looked me squarely in the eyes and said, "Lady, what future? I ain't got no future. I ain't got nothing to lose." It's time to prove that boy's truth wrong in our militarily powerful, materially rich but spiritually poor nation, and to honor the sacrifice of this prophet of God who died to help redeem the soul of America.
It's now up to each of us to pick up the mantle of justice and lift high the torch of freedom for our children and grandchildren. Dr. King told and showed us what to do. Let's do it.
Follow Marian Wright Edelman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ChildDefender
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How much money was saved by making it in China?
Why not create Americans jobs and be made by Americans in the USA?
1. The Republican Party has become the party of exclusion, of greed and exploitatiÂon. Republicans have a black, a women, anglos, liberals and conservatives running for president.
2. They have passed laws in state legislaturÂes that deprive Black citizens the right to vote. An ID card is does not block anyone from voting. We need ID cards for all other transactions, why not voting?
3. Obama care is not affordable and is not constitutional. It will bankrupt the country. Nothing is free!
4. Obama's Jobs Bill is just another spending package. Another spending package will not create jobs. The government CANNOT create real jobs! Democrats also oppose his bill.
5. Obama is a Socialist. Socialism only expands poverty, not jobs.
6. Martin Luther King was a religious conservative Republican.
2. Why do you need ID cards. Other ID's besides photo, and driver's licenses. Human beings are generally recognizable as human beings.
3. It is constitutional and we are paying ten times more than we should be paying than if the system was universal. Health care should be a right!!!!!!
4. It will create jobs, two million jobs. Ask any economist that doesn't work for Fox News. The tax is on those who earn a million dollars a years. They can afford it especially since their gains are a result of gaming the system.
5. Obama is not a socialist. Business has never done better. The problem is that business has out-sourced our jobs.
6. Martin Luther King is, was and always will be, A DEMOCRAT!!!!!!!!!
And don't give me any nonsense about “Reagan ended the War on Poverty.†There has not been a single year in the last 50 when federal spending on anti-poverty programs did not increase. Not one. During Reagan's 8 years, federal spending on welfare programs doubled - from $100 billion to $200 billion. It is now $700 billion. And poverty is worse.
When Reagan left office in 1988, federal spending was $1.064 trillion and the deficit was $155 billion. Current spending is almost 4 times as high as Reagan's; and the deficit now is the same in a MONTH as Reagan's for his entire final YEAR. And with all that additional spending, can anyone name a single thing that the federal government does a better job of now than it did in 1988? I doubt it.
I have a dream!
Got a link to back that up?
Observe how the president aligns himself alongside MLK ....for they are not the same values/beliefs upon deeper introspection and action.
President Obama:
The monument is yours","Dr. King wasn't always considered a unifying figure. Even after rising to prominence, even after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. King was vilified by many, denounced as a rabble rouser and an agitator, a communist and a radical. He was even attacked by his own people, by those who felt he was going too fast or those who felt he was going too slow; by those who felt he shouldn't meddle in issues like the Vietnam War or the rights of union workers". Progress was hard. Progress was purchased through enduring the smack of billy clubs and the blast of fire hoses. It was bought with days in jail cells and nights of bomb threats. For every victory during the height of the civil rights movement, there were setbacks and there were defeats.
"Dr. King wasn't always considered a unifying figure. Even after rising to prominence, even after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. King was vilified by many, denounced as a rabble rouser and an agitator, a communist and a radical. He was even attacked by his own people, by those who felt he was going too fast or those who felt he was going too slow; by those who felt he shouldn't meddle in issues like the Vietnam War or the rights of union workers".
Martin Luther King was no where near a Barack Obama. ideologically nor politically, for the tactics used for affective change are vastly apart. Dr. King wanted to create change within the system, Barack Obama, wants the Fundamental Transformation of America to change the system entirely.
Dr. King believed in our Constitution and Declaration as written, not Barack Obama, for he has publicly stated our Constitution itself is a flawed document....and as such, being a Constitutional Lawyer, has tried to find ways around the Constitution, to either ignore, or challenge or circumvent the very document for the advancement of his own agenda.
Dr. King was nonviolent. He did not try to bring down our whole system of government. He did not stop or impede others rights of movement nor destroy property of others.
Here we have a very clear and fundamentally opposite viewpoint of governance. The president and this president's Chicago Style Political Machine, is relentless in the advancement of their goal...for the Total Fundamental Transformation of America, and the formation of one vastly different than the America we knew.