Glenn Beck chose Aug. 28, the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, to rally his supporters on the Mall in Washington. Beck's choice may seem like a provocation, but it isn't all that surprising, coming from someone who has shown how little he understands about Dr. King and his legacy.
There may be no figure in America who has done as much to encourage racial resentment and grievance over the last two years as Glenn Beck. His radio and television shows have become a forum for all manner of race-baiting, as he tells his mostly white listeners that a vindictive corps of black people inside and outside government is out to get them.
Everyone knows that Beck said President Obama "has a deep-seated hatred of white people... This guy is, I believe, a racist." But that was just one of many racially-charged comments Beck has made. He repeatedly called health care reform "reparations," telling his listeners and viewers that reform was a punishment exacted on white Americans. It's a regular theme for Beck, who says Obama's agenda is an attempt to "settle old racial scores." And Beck, along with his colleagues at Fox News, have gone on one crusade after another about supposedly scary black people who are out to get whites, such as Van Jones and the New Black Panther Party.
In reference to the Shirley Sherrod case, Beck asked his radio listeners, "Have we suddenly transported into 1956, except it's the other way around? Does anybody else have a sense that there are some that just want revenge?" Beck's suggestion that he is "reclaiming the civil rights movement" might be true -- it's just that in Beck's world, civil rights advocates and President Obama are the racists, but he and his cohorts seeking to foment racial animosity and scare white people are the champions of liberty.
Perhaps Mr. Beck will take this opportunity to go back and read the words Dr. King spoke on that day in 1963. As he looked out over the assembled marchers, Dr. King said, "Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred." Sadly, that cup of bitterness and hatred is one Glenn Beck drinks from constantly -- and implores his fans to drink from as well.
Dr. King offered America and the world a powerful message of love, nonviolence, justice, and equality. Glenn Beck offers a message of resentment and fear. Beck can take to the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, but his message couldn't be more opposed to everything Dr. King stood for.
It's no secret that he had a horrific childhood, raised by a drug addicted mother who commited suicide during his teens, leaving enough emotional scars for several lifetimes. Sadly, what Beck lacks is introspection. He hasn't "worked a program." He grabbed onto facile religiosity to try to make sense of the world. And now he's proselytizing--all emotional epiphany; no logical content.
It's not the Christian teachings of forgiveness, kindness and charity, not just because of his Mormon conversion. He simply has no conscious inner life. It all goes up on the screen. In his soul he is a terrified child whose world makes no sense. Unless he visits that inner history he will slip deeper and deeper into demagoguery, feeding the restless, unhappy tea baggers his Apocalyptic kool-aid (and using it to make money). The tragedy is that anytime he could conceivably start a journey of healing. If he doesn't he will try to drag the world into his inner hell.
1. When Obama FIRED Sherrod (or even more meekly, had someone fire her), it was because of instantaneous villification from the NAACP and the White House, based on BAD, highly edited footage (smacks of "the Cambridge police acted stooopidly...")
2. When that happened, Beck, glaringly and vociferously on his program begged the powers that be to not judge her until the facts all came out.
3. Beck, not the NAACP nor Obama, in this case, was right - and it was all because of a LACK of racial bias.
Hurl epitheticals all you want...it's just lazy non ideas. I am not a Beck fan, but neither am I able to sit idly by when someone, paid by the taxpayers to be a lawmaker, makes a mockery of the truth and debases herself. Shameful.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=38767
excerp:
Like most Americans, I’ve had enough with this administration’s policies. I was fed up and fired up.
I am even more so in the wake of the most moving gathering I’ve ever been privileged to be a part of.
At one point, some of the people attending the Rev. Al Sharpton’s “counter rally,” coined “Reclaiming King,” stopped me. I guess they must have been judging me by the color of my skin not the content of my character, because they asked if I was going to come join them.
“No, I won’t be there,” I told them. “Why?” one of them asked with a grimace on his face. I looked at him and said, “I want to be where the Lord is and the Lord is in this place.”
One of the older black women in the group asked me if I felt like I was “selling out” for being one of the “tokens” in the Beck rally crowd?
I laughed and said “Ma’am, Al Sharpton is a pretender. He is going to tell you to pretend that the color of your skin matters. He is going to ask you to ignore the now overwhelming proof that 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, blacks are now destroying each other faster than the KKK could have dreamed.”
As I walked away, the group stood frozen, not knowing how to reply.
"The message I took away is that we cannot continue to pick at the scab of America's past but must become the balm that heals it. That's the way forward—arm in arm, moving together, toward a better future."
Accusations of racism tossed carelessly at ordinary people with ordinary hopes and basic goodwill toward their fellow human beings - those accusations are picking at a scab and making a wound unnecessarily.
imho
Very well said.
Beck is many things, and not allof them are easy to put up with. He's not a racist, however, and one need only listen to anything he has said, with an open mind, to hear those words.
He is hyperbolic and sometimes ridiculous, but he is not racist.
That the good congresswoman has the time and inclination to pick a fight with someone on this forum only speaks of cowardice.
That's a rant, alright. It's a rant against - read that word again - AGAINST the teachings of Black Liberation Theology, because Black Liberation Theology is RACIST teaching. It is some of the most vile and repugnant stuff espoused, and breeds hate. I submit as evidence, Barack Obama's own minister, the Rev. Wright. Obama listed him as spiritual mentor, father figure, dedicated his two books (that he wrote, about himself) to Rev. Wright. Wright is the godfather of Obama's TWO girls. Yet, for 20 years sitting in the front row of that church and with ears that big, Obama cannot, will not and does not admit to hearing, or remembering ANY word from EVERY sermon he EVER heard there.
Why? Because the divisiveness and bigotry in those sermons that Obama listened to for 20 years are so hateful that Obama is afraid to even be tangentially associated with the Rev. today.
You need to check your context, sir.
Constantly? No, he is not constantly doing things which should qualify, even to someone on the left, as bitterness and hatred.
Aren't elected representatives supposed to be better than rodeo clowns like Beck? Please back off from the over-generalizations. Try to see some good in people. Give us a good example of not "drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred".
I love the next line of the Dream speech. I don't live up to it all the time, or even most of the time. But I like to remember it. I think most of us could benefit from keeping it in mind:
"We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline."
And there was the Nixon "Southern Strategy," And I watched the Dixiecrats become the Dixiecans.
And I recall they did not get the forty acres and the mule. Instead they got Jim Crow which lives on in the draconian penal system that sends blacks to the government pea farms in the supposedly polite version of slavery.
Oh I wish you still used the N word because your Republican supply side economics and white flight & gated suburbs and your de-funding of public education still reeks of racism, pure and simple,
So wave your rebel flags high. But we do not need them to see what you are.
Civil Rights Act 1964 vote results are interesting. Republicans like to say Dems filibuster the House bill when it came to the Senate, but leave out that it included a Republican. When the final vote on the Senate version was made not a single southern republican voted for it in either the house or the senate. Even among the northern republicans, 16% voted against the final act, while amongh northern dems only 2% voted against the act.
http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2009/10/inflation_adjus.php
While the path ahead is yet a long and unknown journey, we as a nation have obviously made major strides. This year, nothing could be more ironic than to see the faces surrounding the reflecting pool. By hit or miss, conservatives participated in a rave of religious revival paying homage to two slain heroes. As the gathered were the successors to traditions of separatism and states rights, we witnessed a simple twist of fate.
Beck's criticis have completely dismissed the fact that Dr Almeda King (niece of ML King) participated and highly praised the event afterwards!