Rev. Dr. William Barber II is president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and one of the leaders of the Moral Mondays movement.
Rev. William Barber, NY Times - I believe that deep within our being as a nation there is a longing for a moral movement that plows deep into our souls—a movement that recognizes that we can’t be, as the scriptures say, ‘at ease in Zion’—a longing that recognizes that the attacks we face today on fundamental civil rights, including attacks on the great hallmark of equal protection under the law and the promise to establish justice, which are supposed to be at the heart of who we are as a nation, are not a sign of our weakness, but rather the sign of a worrisome fear by those who hold extremist views and do not welcome a truly united society.
It is this longing that explains why today, despite the attacks, we are seeing a merging of the tributaries that run toward the great stream of justice: people regardless of race, creed, color, gender, sexuality, or class—whether in the Hands up, Don’t Shoot, I Can’t Breathe, and Black Lives Matter movements; the Fast Food workers Raise Up and minimum wage movements; the Voting Rights and People Over Money movements; the Women’s Rights, End Rape Culture movements; the LGBT Equality movements; the Immigrant Rights, Not One More movements; or the state-based anti-racism, anti-poverty, pro-justice, fusion Moral Monday movement— we are flowing together....
If we continue pushing forward together, this will be the birth of what will be a Third Reconstruction movement in America, a movement that will push us toward our truest hope of a ‘more perfect union’ where peace is established through justice, not fear, and where, in the prescient words of a great poet, ‘opportunity is real, and life is free… where equality is in the air we breathe.’
2 comments:
He needs to add in the environmental and climate movements to keep the momentum
This is what I wrote yesterday along the same lines
http://prosperityforri.com/the-us-as-a-rogue-nation/
The US as a Rogue Nation Greg Gerritt
It seems like everyone on the planet is sick of the stupid games that the American Government plays. A nation steeped in genocide and slavery and the violence necessary to keep such a stupid game going has created a domestic politics that makes useful engagement with everyone else on the planet nearly impossible.
Torture and climate change probably lead the list of American missteps, but policies around nuclear weapons, healthcare, privacy, destroying villages in order to save them, racism, trade and aid policies that are welfare for wealthy American lobbyists/campaign contributors, the world’s largest arms industry, spying on everyone, killing for oil, propping up dictators, arming Israel, and helping US banks and the financial industry loot the world also rank pretty high on the list of stupid things done by the American government, that currently leave Washington DC heads spinning as the US faces the global resistance to American madness.
Killing for peace is not working. The empire is bankrupting us and has not made us any safer. Unfortunately in the US the domestic politics of failure in military adventurism results in ever greater violence and lunacy on the part of the rich and religious fundamentalists, further feeding the rolling disaster. The militarization of American police forces, matching the violence blasted from American weapons around the world can not bring us to healthy communities.
Unfortunately for the American ruling class and fundamentalists just as drone warfare is getting us nowhere in Asia, police violence backfiring here as well. And on that hopeful note I bid you good day.
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