Theoblogical

Be Schofield’s article I blogged about earlier includes this assesment of MLK’s “final campaign” (the Poor People’s March)  :

King had developed several goals in his final campaign, which may or may not inspire the OWS movement. He had hoped the Poor People’s Campaign would achieve direct employment through a massive public works program, a guaranteed annual income, funding for teaching and education and adequate medical care for the poor. King also said, “We need the equivalent of Medicare for housing.” It’s simple: jobs, income, housing, education and the elimination of poverty.

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2011/10/25/just-camp-here-and-stay-dr-king-and-the-occupy-wall-street-movement/

The events in the ArabSpring got me asking “how long before we have ours in the US?”  The answer appears tohave been about 7 months,  as Sep. 17 is marked as the start of OWS.   In August,  I ordered a book entitled :  The Last Crusade:  MLK , the FBI, and the Poor People’s Campaign by Gerald McKnight.

I suspected that this would be a point of theological impact that would be a likely focal point since MLK gave us such a historical precedent to the powerof non-violent mass movements.  On the secular front,  this would be a new chapter in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present

I had also been moved by the actions of Wisconsin against the “Scott Walker regime” that was  aprt  of a nationwide GOP effort to cut the support out of the possible sources of resistance to even further curtailing of People’s rights.

The above  quote’s expressed desire that a “Works program”  be set in motion also makes me desire a look into the details of FDR.  I have read some  of the desires of Obama to draw some remedy models from the Works program begun in 1933 (and subsequently squelched and defunded by “austerity measures” in the conservative backlash that followed).  I have read about Obama’s historical interest and admiration for FDR in Ron Suskind’s book “Confidence Men”,  in which I am about halfway.  Pretty fascinating read based on Suskind’s many in depth interviews with numerous members of Obama’s “advisory team”,  both those on the cabinet level and those on “the outside” but consulted.  It has given me some small measure  of attenuation to my criticisms of and frustrations with Obama,  but leaves me still disappointed that he wasn’t stronger.

Much more to come. Lots of people talking MLK and OWS today.  Check out the posts at occupytheology.org  (which is a special section of this blog with a custom post type of occupytheology,  which in turn posts automatically to my twitter account for occupytheology.  It’s all “theoblogical”.

On Dr. King’s birthday, Jan. 15th 1968 – which was sadly to be his last – he was organizing with a multi-racial coalition of Native Americans, Chicanos, Appalachian whites and urban black people to start an encampment in Washington D.C. that would be a massive “nonviolent army” which would “cripple the operation of an oppressive society.” By 1968, King’s earlier emphasis on civil rights had evolved into a revolutionary stance against capitalism, the Vietnam War, U.S. Imperialism and poverty.

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2011/10/25/just-camp-here-and-stay-dr-king-and-the-occupy-wall-street-movement/

King, on the need to “force the hand” of the power structure. By this I mean:  Simply voting for people who we think will represent us has become co-opted by the massive  amounts of money brought to bear in our politics.  (Why does the Tea Party not get as upset about this as they are about the  fact  that Obama is president)?  Back to the King quote:

We must formulate a program and we must fashion the new tactics which do not count on government good will, but instead serve to compel unwilling authorities to yield to he mandates of justice…There must be more than a statement to the larger society, there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point. The interruption must not, however, be clandestine or surreptitious. It must be open and, above all, conducted by large masses without violence. If the jails are filled to thwart it, its meaning will become even clearer.

author of the post quoted here is Be Scofield, a Dr. King scholar, founder of God Bless the Whole World and studying to be an interfaith minister at Starr King School for the Ministry. He writes for Tikkun magazine and Alternet.org. Follow him on twitter: http://twitter.com/bescofield

In a few weeks some of us are coming to Washington to see if the will is still alive or if it is alive in this nation. We are coming to Washington in a Poor People’s Campaign. Yes, we are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We are going to bring those who have known long years of hurt and neglect. We are going to bring those who have come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. We are going to bring children and adults and old people, people who have never seen a doctor or a dentist in their lives.

We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.

We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.

Why do we do it this way? We do it this way because it is our experience that the nation doesn’t move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.

http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_remaining_awake_through_a_great_revolution/
Further:

Let me close by saying that we have difficult days ahead in the struggle for justice and peace, but I will not yield to a politic of despair. I’m going to maintain hope as we come to Washington in this campaign. The cards are stacked against us. This time we will really confront a Goliath. God grant that we will be that David of truth set out against the Goliath of injustice, the Goliath of neglect, the Goliath of refusing to deal with the problems, and go on with the determination to make America the truly great America that it is called to be.

It seems that thirty years since the great siphon of income inequality began it’s huge “engineering project” of regearing our politcal wheels to tilt this system toward the rich,  we are faced with a stonewall of unwillingness to do anything;  that “Goliath of neglect”

There’s an audio player on the  page at the above  link which contains the full speech recording, one of the last ones (March 31)  MLK gave before his April 4 death.

“You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry.… Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong…with capitalism.… There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
—–MLK

http://www.thenation.com/blog/164080/king-versus-tea-party-poor-peoples-campaign-occupy

Wouldn’t  the Tea Party just have a fit,  especially since the word “socialism” is used,  one of their  “scare” words to which they so innately react.  They have little clue about what the actual proponents of socialism say about what it describes.  A nation dubbing itself as “socialist” or not has nothing to do with how “socialist” it really is.  In fact,   the idea  of a “REPUBLIC”, which is constantly invoked by Tea Partiers,  is fulfilled in the aims of “socialism”,  having a sense of us “being in this  together”.

In arguing for the the long march to Washington and ongoing protests by the poor and working people, King declared: “Timid supplication for justice will not solve the problem. We have got to confront the power structure massively.”

A good one from John Nichols of The Naiton re: MLK and OWS:

Asked about “Occupy Wall Street,” Congressman West declared this week: “Martin Luther King Jr. would not have backed these types of protesters.”
Dr. King’s history, and his own words, say otherwise.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/164080/king-versus-tea-party-poor-peoples-campaign-occupy

Nichols quotes MLK:

“America is at a crossroads of history, and it is critically important for us as a nation and a society to choose a new path and move upon it with resolution and courage.… In this age of technological wizardry and political immorality, the poor are demanding that the basic needs of people be met as the first priority of our domestic program,” Dr. King declared, in launching the campaign that sought to proposed to bring the poor to Washington, march to the offices of federal agencies and camp out until action was taken to address economic inequality and injustice

And then,  like me,  he observes:

That sounds an awfully lot like Occupy Wall Street.

But, of course, West objects: “First of all, Martin Luther King, Jr. had a focus, a message. He was divinely inspired. I don’t know what the inspiration is for these individuals.”

West charged that the Occupy movement is really a left-wing assault on the existing economic order. “We’re starting to really see the face of who liberal progressives are,” warned West. “I think there is a danger in the people on Capitol Hill starting to embrace this movement.”

OK,  back to me.    Yeah,  if you want to call this a “left wing assault”  ,  then this is what we need.   MLK was constantly dubbed “left wing”,  “communist” , “socialist”,  “agitator”.   In fact, King described himself as a “democratic socialist”.  And yeah,  Mr. West,  if you don’t know what “the inspiration” for these individuals is (invoking a vision of the church lady asking “who could it be?  Hmmm?   Whoooo could it be?”)  My  reply toMr. West is that whwatever it is,  MLK would find ideological affinity with them,  and question the Tea Party’s acquiescence to the  status quo.  Everything the Tea Party does is status quo,  aside  from their rabid Anti-Obama hysteria.  The Tea Party BEGAN when Obama emerged as the likely candidate.  And the Tea  Party was off and running (at least that’s the way I remember it).