On the eve of President Obama's birth date, thoughts turn to his time in office. As a man, countless admire the person, Barack Obama, and yet, feel that they cannot fully celebrate his performance. Hope has all but disappeared. Audacity appears vanquished. Still, some are sure that there is reason to believe. People ponder potentials not fully realized. Prospects for change loom large. Several may be shared in the sentiments offered on this auspicious occasion.
Dreams have yet to die. The desire to write to the President on the anniversary of his birth or converse with him personally is strong. Most will only be able to meet Mister Obama circuitously. Nonetheless, millions will try to talk to the man in the White House. People, such as esteemed Educator, Doctor Cornel West has addressed the President profoundly though the airwaves. "One of America's most provocative public intellectuals," West speaks of what is needed for a genuine success. The Princeton Professor ponders aloud; if only President Obama advanced classlessness.
On Sunday, President Obama made a quick, unannounced trip to Afghanistan, just to check in on his own personal war-one that every honest historian in the world knows that America will someday lose, since no empire has ever conquered Afghanistan and held it. With his own war and his own Nobel Peace Prize, he's got everything a poltical leader could possibly want. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, PBS airs a Tavis Smiley's special "MLK: A Call to Conscience", where we get to see what a real Peace Prize winner-and a real hero-sounds like. Here's a brief excerpt, revolving around King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech given April 4, 1967:
REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight, because my conscience leaves me no other choice. A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
CLAYBORNE CARSON: Martin Luther King knew, when he gave that speech, that it would set off a firestorm.
SUSANNAH HESCHEL: It's the speech that challenges us, and in that sense it's his most important. That we are uncomfortable with that speech tells us something.
REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Well, such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, that question suggests that they do not know the world in which they live.
VINCENT HARDING: It was precisely one year to the day after this speech that that bullet, which had been chasing him for a long time, finally caught up with him. And I am convinced that that bullet had something to do with that speech.
On Monday, Smiley was on Democracy Now!, where that excerpt was aired.
The special also includes the following powerful message from Cornel West:
CORNEL WEST: Here he was shouting, a voice, prophetic voice in the wilderness, and he knew the sleepwalking was increasing. What he didn't know was that the sleepwalking would get thicker and thicker during the age of Reagan. And what he didn't know, that there was a black man on the way to the White House in 2009, and was hoping that there would be some awakening connected to his legacy of focusing on poor people and working people and jobs and homes and studying war, no more, not because a president would be pacifist, because it upset me when I heard my dear brother Barack Obama criticize Martin on the global stage, saying that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s insights were not useful for a commander-in-chief, because evil exists, as if Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't know about evil.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was fighting terrorism. He was an anti-terrorist who was fighting Jim Crow and James Crow. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew something about evil, more so than many of us, including our beloved president. But he also knew that if you don't break the cycle of domination and bigotry and hatred and try to exemplify some alternative, then that cycle would be reinforced in such a way that you would be a pro-war president, pro-war citizen, and not giving peace a chance.
Justice is nothing but love with legs. Justice is what love looks like when it takes social form.
When Serene Jones said that on Bill Moyers Journal on Friday, I knew I had to write a diary about the show (trancript here.) Jones is the first female head of Union Theological Seminary, the oldest nondenominational seminary in the United States. As Moyers said, it's "known around the world for applying a progressive Christian critique to politics, economics, and social justice." Jones previously spent 17 years on the faculty at Yale.
Also on the show were Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics, at Union Theological Seminary, and Cornell West, of Princeton, who is currently also team-teaching a course with Jones and Dorrien at UTS. They talked a good deal about religion, social justice and the political crisis of our day. They are a living reminder of just how far short Obama's politics falls compared to the prophetic calling of his pretended faith.
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