Thoughts on Dr. King and National Service

by Trish Kahle (appeared on her blog: I Can't Believe We Still Have to Protest This Shit)



I often wonder what Dr. King would think about his holiday, and especially what he would think about it being branded as a 'National Day of Service.'

While it's true that Dr. King was one of the great leaders of the Civil Rights movement, when the white government was looking for a Black person to give a holiday to, they chose him over so many others--Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Medgar Evers. And since Dr. King never once gave into white pressure or demands, we must ask ourselves why.

The surface reason--or what the white elite will give you for a reason--is that he was a great man (which he was) who promoted equality and peace (which he did). Then they proceed to pare down the life an extraordinary man to the one great speech, 'I Have a Dream.'

The real reason they chose Dr. King to 'honor' was because they thought that over time, his struggle could be rebranded as something less dangerous. Half a century later, sit-ins and marches hardly seem that earth shattering to most people--mostly because the nasty parts where the police gassed, beat, shot, and killed activists are glossed over or left out entirely. In fact, they almost make it seem as though Civil Rights were in their plans all along, and Dr. King was really just their puppet. Anyone who understands the nature of Dr. King's non-violence and civil disobediance knows that nothing could be further from the truth. But as fewer and fewer participants can give witness and the history books continue to ignore people's struggles, we are in danger of losing the truth forever, of being left with the 'dominant truth'--a 'truth' that is an outright lie.

And Dr. King's militancy certainly presented an easier spin project than Malcolm X's militancy. Instead of being portrayed as two great men whose ideas were coming closer and closer to convergence, King is propped up (as much as the white elite will ever prop up a empowered Black man) and Malcolm X is villified and made out to be a 'terrorist.' (Hmm...is this sounding a little too familiar yet?)

But as Dr. King said, when peaceful revolution becomes impossible, violent revolution becomes inevitable.

And now I come to addressing the 'day of service' notion.

Dr. King not only fought racial injustice, he fought poverty, imperialism, and capitalism. (But since those parts are 'dangerous,' we're encouraged to ignore them if we're taught them at all.) Considering this, I have a hard time believing that Dr. King would ever want us to commit ourselves in his honor and memory in service to a nation that half a century later is still racist, imperialist, and capitalist.

No. I think Dr. King would have us out in the streets marching, boycotting, and resisting today and everyday. It is a disgrace to his legacy and memory for us to become complicit in the system that he fought everyday. In the system that murdered him and so many others for their dissent and resistance.

If Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is really about serving our community--and not the government that oppresses us--then let's do it. The best way to serve the people--and ourselves--is to fight for our own power.

Ode to Haiti: What Bothered Me, What Didn't

by Kari Ross (originally posted at her blog, Ode to Patriarchy)

As I assume most of you know by now, there was a massive 7.0 earthquake in Haiti Tuesday at 4:53 pm local time. The earthquake was strongest near Port-au-Prince, the nation's capital.

Right now, relief supplies are just starting to reach Haiti, but it's taking time for supplies to travel from around the world. Support is being rallied from every direction, and a lot of supplies have already been gathered.

But, I'm bothered. A lot actually.

Yesterday afternoon was when I really found out about the earthquake. It wasn't by watching the news, reading the newspaper, or by seeing a new website. I found out about Haiti through various feminist blogs and websites, as well as a few status updates. Every email I had about Haiti came from one of many mailings list of feminist foundations that I belong to and from friends whom I would've expected to know about it. I looked at major news sites and engines that have running news feeds in order to get more specific information.

I couldn't find it. On Yahoo!, where I normally find news topics that I'm interested in, the earthquake was about three panels in which is about 12 or so news topics. The article had the reoccurring quotes regarding "serious loss of life" but ex-convict NHL stars placed higher.

I went to CNN. I didn't find it on the main page. If it was there, it was too small for me to be able to locate amidst the MASS of text that is CNN.com. I gave up on trying to find it on my own, and googled "Haiti earthquake." I then found roughly the same article in the various news sites that I did on Yahoo!, most likely due to the lack of available information than anything else.

Now almost every website, from news to gaming, has some message about Haiti. It's practically the only thing you can read about.

Why is it that feminist sites and organizations had to tell me about Haiti, considering it's a massive natural disaster of global proportions and also the first of 2010? Especially about a country that is as far away from Miami as I am from my home town?

I will concede that I do not watch news on TV. I watch very little TV at school and what I do watch consists of the same regular programs. There may have been better coverage of the earthquake on the CNN channel or NBC or ABC. HOWEVER, there was surprisingly little coverage from my resources for general news. It was covered and then dropped, and only picked up again when everyone started to care that massive amounts of people were dead.

When it's something that big, why isn't in the news... the WHOLE DAY? It's estimated that 50,000 were killed in a span of about a minute and this is getting pushed down in your news feed? By sports news? I think some websites need to re-evaluate their priorities.

What did NOT bother me, however, was the quick and immediate response on my college campus once the news got out. A friend of mine spoke to me about getting something started to help our Haitians students and their families during this time, and within an hour or two we collected $14 from one residence hall and by lunch the next day we had almost $100. While we were starting our coin drive, Intervarsity (one of our campus' most prominent religious student organizations) was working to get donations of food and supplies for the Red Cross. Our Student Activist Movement and Salem AntiWar had begun to plan donations boxes to set up in every residence hall by Monday. This has been one of the strongest, quickest, and most effective responses that I have seen from my campus in the two and a half years that I have been here, with a majority of the work coming from students. My college can be very aware and active at times, but it takes a lot to get the majority of student body involved, and this did.

This did make my realize and evaluate feminism's position in my life. The fact that my nation's news agencies and even the agencies of other countries could not and did not provide me with information about the year's first major tragedy, but my fellow women at Feministing.com and Feminist Majority Foundation did framed the media in a different way for me. As soon as the information was available, feminism showed me how I could help, but the news media just said what the organizations I wanted to donate to were doing. It was through my feminist sisters (and those who may not consider themselves "feminists" but seem very feminist to me) and myself that we were able to get a coin drive started. And my previous involvement with other feminist actions around campus helped me to be able to get started quickly, and not wait around while I figured out how I wanted to do this. I feel renewed in my belief in feminism (not that I necessarily needed renewing). I feel very renewed in my appreciation of those people around me at my college as a whole.

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If you would like to donate or become involved in any of the efforts at Salem College, please contact me on Facebook, Twitter, or through email. Any spare change, even if you have given already is desperately needed and would go to a good cause. For those of you outside of Salem who read this, please keep those affected by the earthquake both in Haiti and around the world in your thoughts.

Also, here's a Community Feministing.com post with various resources on how to help, where to get news, and how this is affecting women: "How to help out in Haiti: thinking about women's and reproductive health"

Haiti Needs Your Help

Haiti Needs Your Help!

Please join the Student Activist Movement and Salem AntiWar to donate items to be sent to help relief efforts in Haiti. As you may know, the situation there is one of complete devastation, and anything we can do to help will be appreciated. We need to save as many lives as we can.

Possible Items to Donate:

Bottled Water of Any Size
Water Purification Tablets
Canned Goods
Packaged Non-Perishable Food
Baby formula and Diapers
Gauze, Bandages, and other First Aid Supplies
Clothes

Collecting from Monday 18 Jan. to Friday 22 Jan.! Donation boxes will be placed in all Salem College Residence Halls and in the RAT.

All donations will be sent to Haiti through Goler Memorial AME Zion Church.

For more information, please contact Trish Kahle or Destiney Linker.

Posted by Trish

Haitian Relief

Salem AntiWar and the Student Activist Movement are working together to organize a donation drive to contribute to earthquake humanitarian relief in Haiti. Specific details on where and how to donate will be posted in the next 24 hours.

posted by Trish

Imperialism, Racism, and Haiti

by Trish Kahle

When Haiti was rocked by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck just outside Port-au-Prince, it shed light on the devastatingly poor nation--the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. Obama said that the United States would most certainly help Haiti in its hour of need. Well, Mr. President, I hate to break it to you, but it's been Haiti's hour of need for a while. You can point to the UN Peacekeeping mission of 9,000. You can point to the abysmally small aid packages already sent.

But not too long ago, Obama sent a $663.8 billion dollar defense budget to Congress for approval. Of course it will be approved. No one seems to mind killing people, directly or indirectly, however much it costs. And spending that same money to care for those people would of course never pass Congress. After all, there's little profit for companies like DynCorp, Halliburton, or Blackwater in that. Who do you think gives more money to Congressional campaigns--the disenfranchised, homeless woman or Blackwater?

It's frankly embarrassing to live in a country that will spend over $663.8 billion on what essentially boils down to murder. Imagine if that money had been spent building schools, bridges, levees, and other structures able to withstand natural disasters--not just in Haiti but in countries all over the world, including the United States.

The imperial message of the US is very, very clear. Don't conform to our policies? We'll attack. You're not white? We'll make bombs before we house you adequately. It's no coincidence that the people who live in the poorest areas on Earth are Black, Beige, and Brown. It's racism. Racism enforced by the American DoD. These people suffer every day, not just when natural disaster strikes, because the US government and other governments of the developing world would rather spend $52 billion on fighter jets that can't be flown in the rain than aid them.

This "natural" disaster, and others like them, are the indirect result of American imperialism and defense spending. Axe the military budget, and maybe we could kill two birds with one stone.

[I'd Like to Shred] Obama's Report Card

by Destiney Linker for Salem AntiWar

People of the world (or, at least, the maximum four of you who will read this), forgive me. This is my first blog in years and my first ever to deal with a political situation.

That said, let me say that I am deeply disappointed in President Barack Obama. Of all the people I know who voted for him, I probably had the most hope for his administration, a fact which can be easily demonstrated by the embarrassing admonition that I received a commemorative Obama plate for Saturnalia 2008 and cried as I opened it. Yes. Cried. Actual tears. I’m not a political expert; my biggest claim to expertise would be the several hundred hours I log every year watching CNN.

THAT said, let me get to the actual point here: though I am shamed at the lack of progress our president has shown on many issues, namely healthcare, the multiple wars in which the US is engaged, and LGBTQ rights, I also find myself in the conundrum of being disappointed, yet unsurprised. Despite the millions of people who found themselves wiping away tears of joy at the image of President Bush hauling his sorry administration out of the White House as Obama triumphantly pushed his way into the clusterfuck that W. had left him, I saw this coming all along. Sure, I was blinded by pure relief and an inevitable admiration for Obama, which I still hold even though he has let us all down, but I knew that, despite the rhetoric of change that was a hallmark of his campaign, he would commence upon the weighty task of destroying this country, much the way presidents have been doing since 1945 (that’s an optimistic estimation).

This cynicism results, not surprisingly, from my exceedingly liberal college education. And, since Obama announced his decision to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, my doubts have been confirmed.

You see (and I say this with the motivation of sounding not-so-preachy), Obama enters into an administration that just recently (if at all) emerged from the invisible quagmire that was the Cold War. The US/Soviet tensions that escalated in the post-WWII years defined a new era in US foreign policy. As I learned in a Spring International Relations course, foreign policy rarely, if ever, changes significant course. This makes sense. As many of you may know, the effect of real time events takes a considerable while to show their mark on the man-made constructs that are national and international markets. The same goes for the realm of politics, except on a greater scale.

This state of things worsens when we consider the fact that justification of war/intervention (in such conflicts as Korea, Vietnam, and the myriad depositions for which the CIA was responsible [aka, the assassinations of such democratically leaders as Patrice Lumumba of the Congo]) upon the threat of communism has evolved to encompass the abstract entity that is terrorism. In other words, the US government has, in essence, brainwashed the American people to believe that, just like communism, terrorism is a constant and viable threat to homeland security. While actual events such as 9/11 are undeniably real, they stem more from a demographic’s unwillingness to submit to the continuation of American imperialism in the Middle East than from any real vendetta against the people of this country. While these actions may be backed by motives quoting Allah, jihad, and such, it is incredibly narrow-minded to assign the same identity to all perpetrators of terrorist activities when the parameters of terrorism have yet been properly defined. In what way are solitary men with bombs strapped to their shoelaces more “terrorist-y” than a United States Marine who willingly fires upon a group of civilians? This is definitely a grey area, but one which is not analyzed often enough. The United States has justification for being in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I sincerely doubt they are really so noble as Presidents W. and Obama would have us believe. I couldn’t tell you what they are, because I am, unfortunately, a lowly civilian.

President Obama, by announcing another troop surge, is not acting any differently than any president before him would. Rather, he is following a script that has been carefully laid out for him. America’s role in the world has been, by and large, that of poser-policeman. In reality, America is poised to defend her (mostly economic) interests at any cost, human or otherwise. Still virtually disabled by MAD (mutually assured destruction—the “cold” state of tensions between nations that both possess the equal capability to destroy one another), America has turned her head elsewhere, to the Middle East, so that we might wreak havoc there until the countries there, too, have nuclear power. This trend will, unfortunately, continue until there is a revolutionary upheaval in the international paradigm, until nations change the way they conduct business with one another, and until a nation’s power is not determined by its stockpile of nuclear weapons or the number of reluctant people it has under its (hard or soft) control.

Salem AntiWar now has a WEBSITE!

Hey everyone,

Salem AntiWar is pleased to announce the creation of a website! Please look around, bookmark us, and check back for regular updates!

Website

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Posted by Trish