Now, we need a 50th anniversary commemoration of the Poor People's Campaign
We commemorated the 50th anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech today(the speech Dr. King is best remembered for, although those who came after him in our country's political leadership have pretty much , wmanaged to turn the concept of "the Dream" into a vision of nothingness, when they weren't just using it as an excuse to call on people to go back to speech)
But the cause Dr. King was killed for was the cause of poverty and social and economic injustice, a cause for which Dr. King was working to build a multi-racial, multicultural class-based movement for change.
If we are to keep Dr. King's legacy alive in any truly meaningful sense, we need to take up the cause of building a new Poor People's Campaign(a campaign that embraces African-American, Latino-American, N ative American and Impoverished Caucasian Americans as well(remember, most poor people, contrary to Limbaughian/O'Reillian myths, are white and a large block of them are rural). T nhis needs to include both the old-time poor,, the victims of historic hard times, and deliberate impoverishment through redlining and middle-class flight and the new poor who have been cast aside by the greed-on-bath salts economy our country has been stuck with since 1981, the economy Republicans built and that the leaders of OUR party have refused to challenge.
We need to remind the nation that the poor are still here, are still being made to suffer, are not responsible for the creation of their misery, and still deserve to live, to grow, to be treated with dignity and respect, to be allowed to flourish and contribute to life as best they can, and to walk this earth with their heads held high. We need to do this not just because impoverishing people is wrong, but because, unless this country's current path is radically altered, more and more of those who are not yet poor will be falling into poverty...finding ourselves cast off, disrespected, devalued, and left to rot. As the Phil Ochs lyric put it, "there, but for fortune, go you or I".
Poverty is still a crime against this country's soul. Gaining through other people's suffering is still wrong. Declaring other people to be without value is still immoral. And the fight to end want amid plenty must still go on.
The end of poverty is still essential, if we are to heal this nation, and if we are to build the world we need.
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