Mr President, Get on the righteous side of history. MLK Jr's " Silence is Betrayal"

Mr President, I can't fathom how you can be silent when there are peaceful citizens exercising their constitutional rights facing brutal abuse by those sworn to protect them and defend the law. I am sickened by the images I have seen. How can you be silent when it is your job to protect American citizens? How will you explain your silence to your own children? ENOUGH! Perhaps the sage words of a true leader will inspire you to action on behalf of the righteous: "A time comes when silence is betrayal."


Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
By Rev. Martin Luther King
4 April 1967
Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City


-snip


I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

-snip

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm

listen to his words:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Ve5GoHFDg

Because he's self serving first and foremost. And until OWS serves his interests in such a way that defending them against this abuse will benefit him politically, he will remain silent. And I suspect with polls showing a slight dip in popularity of OWS I wouldn't hold my breath for him to be speaking out any time soon.

And he's not even in the same stratosphere as MLK, so asking why he doesn't live up to those standards is a pointless exercise.

UK Guardian Images:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2011/nov/18/occupy-movement#/?picture=382017213&index=1

Is to move the polls. That's one of the main things that matters to him and his handlers.

Unfortunately the other thing that matters (and this probably more so matters to him) is what all the "centrist" pundits on tv and print say. So until someone manages to convince David Brooks or Richard Cohen to write a column about it, or convinces Joe Scarborough to talk more favorably about OWS, then it won't get into Obama's bubble of DC beltway insularity.

:shrug:

or is confident enough that we'll end up giving it anyway no matter how disgusted we are or get. He doesn't do anything not 100% calculating and taking all options and risks (which he hates) into consideration. So obviously they've got enough data to show that he doesn't have to worry about pissing liberals or progressives off because he's had no problem doing that at every turn over the past 3 years.

Now is the time to break with the powers. Or perhaps just after re-election?

So they can consolidate their permanent overclass status - like the previous "Man from Hope" Democrat?

of the Democratic Party and the beginning of the Money Party -imho. Clinton delivered big time for his friend. :mad:

:hi:

:kick:

Well after the bruises have faded, the broken bones have mended, and the riot gear is again hanging on its pegs at the station awaiting another call to brutalize citizens, I will remember the studied silence of our political leaders.

in return for the honor and duty of phoning, contributing, rallying, and voting for him

either you're in Wall Street, the Beltway Establishment, or his veal pen, or you don't deserve to have the Constitution apply to you

...that has been replaced by the morbid fear of terrorism, and under the name of terrorism, our rights have been demolished, starting with the Patriot Act. Then one "police action" after another.

The wealthy and those in power now use terrorism as an excuse for everything; our values have been compromised beyond recognition...the United States is no longer the country to be admired in the world...

Yes, it is time once again for us to undergo a "radical revolution of values", if possible.

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