Video & Multimedia

kpete

(71,961 posts) Thu May 21, 2015, 09:07 AM May 2015

Ken Burns: "BLACK LIVES MATTER-ALL LIVES MATTER" - "Our Cities & Towns Cannot Become Plantations"

WOW - you WILL be inspired, even if you graduated years ago:

OUR CITIES AND TOWNS CANNOT BECOME PLANTATIONS!!!!

Published on May 18, 2015
The complete addess by acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns, a sobering call to action to the Washington University in St. Louis Class of 2015, delivered May 15, 2015. "We broke it, but you've got to fix it," he told some 15,000 graduates, family and friends gathered in Brookings Quadrangle.

a small snippet, please listen to it all, quite beautiful, really:

Before the enormous strides in equality achieved in statutes and laws in the 150 years since the Civil War that Lincoln correctly predicted would come are in danger of being undone by our still imperfect human nature and by politicians who now insist on a hypocritical color-blindness -- after four centuries of discrimination. That discrimination now takes on new, sometimes subtler, less obvious but still malevolent forms today. The chains of slavery have been broken, thank God, and so too has the feudal dependence of sharecroppers as the vengeful Jim Crow era recedes (sort of) into the distant past. But now in places like -- but not limited to -- your other neighbors a few miles as the crow flies from here in Ferguson, we see the ghastly remnants of our great shame emerging still, the shame Lincoln thought would lead to national suicide, our inability to see beyond the color of someone's skin. It has been with us since our founding...

But the shame continues: prison populations exploding with young black men, young black men killed almost weekly by policemen, whole communities of color burdened by corrupt municipalities that resemble more the predatory company store of a supposedly bygone era than a responsible local government. Our cities and towns and suburbs cannot become modern plantations.

It is unconscionable, as you emerge from this privileged sanctuary, that a few miles from here -- and nearly everywhere else in America: Baltimore, New York City, North Charleston, Cleveland, Oklahoma, Sanford, Florida, nearly everywhere else -- we are still playing out, sadly, an utterly American story, that the same stultifying conditions and sentiments that brought on our Civil War are still on such vivid and unpleasant display.

Let me speak directly to the graduating class. (Watch out. Here comes the advice.)

Remember: Black lives matter. All lives matter.

Reject fundamentalism wherever it raises its ugly head. It's not civilized. Choose to live in the Bedford Falls of "It's a Wonderful Life," not its oppressive opposite, Pottersville...

Don't confuse monetary success with excellence. The poet Robert Penn Warren once warned me that "careerism is death"...

Read. The book is still the greatest manmade machine of all -- not the car, not the TV, not the computer or the smartphone.

Do not allow our social media to segregate us into ever smaller tribes and clans, fiercely and sometimes appropriately loyal to our group, but also capable of metastasizing into profound distrust of the other...

Convince your government that the real threat, as Lincoln knew, comes from within. Governments always forget that, too. Do not let your government outsource honesty, transparency or candor. Do not let your government outsource democracy...

Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothing to do with the actual defense of the country -- they just make the country worth defending...

And if you ever find yourself in Huck's spot, if you've "got to decide betwixt two things," do the right thing. Don't forget to tear up the letter. He didn't go to hell -- and you won't either.

MUCH, Much, Much More!!!!!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/21/1386320/-Ken-Burns-Commencement-Speech-line-On-BlackLivesmatter-Gets-Huge-Applause-In-One-for-the-Ages