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But we knew that an endless rebellion against America would lead nowhere.
our priority had to be in correcting the injustices and backwardness of our relationships with one another, with other countries, and with the Earth.
The next American Revolution, at this stage in our history, is not principally about jobs or health insurance or making it possible for more people to realize the American Dream of upward mobility. It is about acknowledging that we Americans have enjoyed middle-class comforts at the expense of other peoples all over the world.
It is about creating a new American Dream whose goal is a higher Humanity instead of the higher standard of living dependent on Empire.
It is about becoming the change we wish to see in the world.
Instead of viewing the U.S. people as masses to be mobilized in increasingly aggressive struggles for higher wages, better jobs, or guaranteed health care, we must have the courage to challenge ourselves to engage in activities that build a new and better world by improving the physical, psychological, political, and spiritual health of ourselves, our families, our communities, our cities, our world, and our planet.
This means that it is not enough to organize mobilizations that call on Congress and the president to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must also challenge the American people to examine why 9/11 happened and why so many people around the world understand, even though they do not support the terrorists, that they were driven to these acts by frustration and anger at the U.S. role in the world, such as supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestine and dictatorships in the Middle East and treating whole countries, the peoples of the world, and Nature only as resources enabling us to
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We have to help the American people grow their souls enough to recognize that because we have been consuming 25 percent of the planet’s fossil fuels even though we are less than 5 percent of the world’s population, we are the ones who must take the first big steps to reduce greenhouse emissions. We are the ones who must begin to live more simply so that others can simply live.
King was calling on us to redeem the soul of America. Speaking for the weak, the poor, the despairing, and the alienated, in our inner cities and in the rice paddies of Vietnam, he was urging us to become a more mature people by making a radical revolution not only against racism but also against materialism and militarism. He was challenging us to “rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.”16
The problem is that our debate is confined to narrow parameters. Too often we regard health care and education as commodities, and we remain complicit as our elected representatives reduce us to consumers.
“Martin wasn’t assassinated for simply wanting black and white children to hold hands, but because he said that there must be fundamental changes in this country and that black people must take the lead in bringing them. . . . Put simply, these problems are Racism, Materialism, Militarism, and Anti-Communism.”
The main reason why Western civilization lacks Spirituality, or an awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and the universe, according to Gandhi, is that it has given priority to economic and technological development over human and community development.
Because modern societies, capitalist or communist, are committed to unlimited growth, Gandhi anticipated that they would eventually become so gigantic and complex that human beings would be reduced to masses, dependent on experts, serving machines instead of being served by them.
Moreover, the abundance created by pursuing unlimited economic growth would make it almost impossible for people to distinguish between Needs and Wants, so that they would end up being enslaved by the temptations of material wealth and luxuries, a form of bondage he considered even more cruel than physical enslavement.
The struggle for independence from Britain, he insisted, should not be mainly a struggle for state power. It should revolve around going to people at the grassroots, helping them to transform their inner and outer lives, and encouraging them to think for themselves in order to create self-reliant local communities.
We must begin the shift from what King called a “thing”-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people,” he declared, “the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”8
We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice.
Instead of pursuing rapid economic development and hoping that it will eventually create community, we need to do the opposite—begin with the needs of the community and create loving relationships with one another and with the Earth.
As Jimmy Boggs used to remind us, revolutions are made out of love for people and for place. He often talked about loving America enough to change it. “I love this country,” he used to say, “not only because my ancestors’ blood is in the soil but because of what I believe it can become.”
Love isn’t just something you feel. It’s something you do every day when you go out and pick up the papers and bottles scattered the night before on the corner, when you stop and talk to a neighbor, when you argue passionately for what you believe with whoever will listen, when you call a friend to see how they’re doing, when you write a letter to the newspaper, when you give a speech and give ’em hell, when you never stop believing that we can all be more than we are. In other words, Love isn’t about what we did yesterday; it’s about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after.
• King was very clear that suffering and oppression are not enough to create a movement.
Confident of their own humanity, movement builders are able to recognize the humanity in others, including their opponents, and therefore the potential within them for redemption. So they hate unjust deeds but are careful not to hate the doers of these deeds. And they choose to struggle nonviolently because they know that nonviolent struggles can become swords that heal, enabling both sides to grow to humanity’s full stature and restoring community, while violent struggles increase the hate, fear, and bitterness in the world.
Our present criminal justice system is based on the concept of punitive or retributive justice.
if instead of trying to keep our children isolated in classrooms for twelve years and more, we engaged them in community-building activities with the same audacity with which the civil rights movement engaged them in desegregation activities forty years ago: planting community gardens, recycling waste, organizing neighborhood arts and health festivals, rehabbing houses, and painting public murals.
By giving our children and young people a better reason to learn than just the individualistic one of getting a job or making more money, by encouraging them to make a difference in their neighborhoods, we would get their cognitive juices flowing.
“we cannot free ourselves until we feed ourselves.”
In other words, it is only when we can provide for our own basic needs that we are empowered to make our own choices.
But as the chaos spreads, an increasing number of these parents are sending their children to magnet, charter, and private schools, thus guaranteeing that those left behind will be treated little better than prisoners with their teachers serving as little better than wardens.
They should instead seek to incorporate learning into work, political organizing, community service, and recreation. More learning needs to occur outside the classroom. Education should involve real problem solving. Instead of rigid age segregation, young and old should mingle. The years of compulsory education should grow shorter, not longer. Education should be spread out over a lifetime.
