notes from underground - societal whispers
all the news that print will fit.


Monday, January 21, 2002  

np: bob dylan - love and theft

i figured that if there really is a day that i should make commentary on this thing, it would be today. the day that our nation celebrates the birth of one of its foremost civil rights workers. celebrating his life and being bitterly reminded of when he was shot down on that fateful day back in 1968. nay sayers (and those who would set back the cause of freedom) will point to his various poor moral choices in life. his various infidelities and failures. but in the words of that same god that dr. king was doing the good work of, 'let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.' it isn't always about what you've done. but rather, how you deal with your failures and how you work to overcome them and make the world a better place for your new knowledge of the self.

i would go on and on about why i feel that today is a necessary day of reflection and looking into the mirror. in light of the situations currently raging in afghanistan, and if some of the web news is to be believed, the situations about to flare up in iraq, it is an even more viable voice of tolerance, peace and equality that we find in the words of dr. king. i will let the great man speak for himself. and let you think for yourselves. and hopefully you will come to the same conclusions i have. that we still have a very, very long way to go. but damnit, we're going to make it.


"Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, 'Wait.' But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim...when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society...when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky...when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you...when your wife and mother are never given the respected title 'Mrs.'...when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness'...then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., letter from Birmingham Jail, 16th April, 1963.

posted by J. Neas | 1/21/2002 02:09:00 PM


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